Free Resources

Free tools for development and vibe coding — AI coding assistants, app builders, LLM API keys, cloud hosting, GPUs and student packs. Everything here is usable from Australia.

Free tiers, limits and regions change often — treat the numbers as a guide and check each provider before you rely on it. Last reviewed July 2026.

Recommended zero-cost starter stack

Starting from scratch? This combination gets you building and shipping AI apps for $0.

1Editor + AI: VS Code + GitHub Copilot Free (or Windsurf for unlimited autocomplete) — Free AI autocomplete and chat right where you write code.
2Free model key: Google AI Studio (Gemini) — A generous free API key to power agents and bring-your-own-key tools.
3Ask / pair: Claude, ChatGPT or Gemini (free chat) — Rubber-duck, plan and debug for $0.
4Ship it: Cloudflare Pages/Workers (or Vercel) — Free hosting + edge compute, fast from Australia.
5Store data: Supabase (Sydney region) — Free Postgres, auth and storage in one.
6Train / ML: Google Colab (free T4 GPU) — Free GPU notebooks for experiments.
7If you study: GitHub Student Developer Pack — Unlocks Copilot Pro free plus a pile of credits.

AI coding assistants (in your editor)

Autocomplete + chat + agents inside VS Code, JetBrains, or their own editor — the core of “vibe coding”.

GitHub Copilot

Free plan: 2,000 completions + 50 chat/agent requests per month. Copilot Pro is free for verified students, teachers & popular open-source maintainers.

Windsurf (Codeium)

Free tier with essentially unlimited autocomplete across 70+ languages, plus a monthly allowance of agent credits.

Cursor

Free (Hobby) tier: basic completions and a small number of premium model requests to trial it.

Cline

Open-source VS Code agent. The extension is free — bring your own API key (use a free LLM key below).

Continue.dev

Fully open-source assistant. $0 when paired with free local models (Ollama) or your own API keys.

Amazon Q Developer

Free tier: ~50 agentic requests/month + inline & CLI autocomplete. Great if you already use AWS.

Zed

Fast native editor. Free tier ~2,000 edit predictions/month; unlimited AI if you bring your own key (or local Ollama).

JetBrains AI

A free AI tier ships in JetBrains IDEs; the IDEs themselves are free for students (see below).

+ 8 more free options

Gemini CLI — Free terminal agent with Gemini 2.5 Pro and 1M context.Gemini Code Assist — Free tier with ~180k completions/month in VS Code & JetBrains.Supermaven — Free inline completions with a 300k-token context window.Tabnine — Free tier with basic completions; privacy-focused.Aider — Open-source terminal pair-programmer; BYO API key (free keys work).Sourcegraph Cody — Free tier for chat + completions with codebase context.Qodo (ex-Codium) — Free plan adds AI test generation and PR reviews.Roo Code — Open-source VS Code agent (Cline fork); BYO key.

Describe-an-app builders

Type what you want and get a working app — the “no editor needed” end of vibe coding.

bolt.new

Free: ~150k–300k tokens/day (1M/month cap). Full-stack apps in the browser, with hosting.

v0 (Vercel)

Free: $5 of credits every month. Excellent for React/UI generation.

Lovable

Free: 5 daily credits. Chat-to-app for non-developers (public projects on free).

Replit

Free: limited Agent trial + hosting for public apps. Good for learning and collaboration.

Firebase Studio (Google)

Free cloud IDE with Gemini built in and Firebase hosting.

Google AI Studio

Free web workspace to prototype with Gemini and grab an API key.

+ 4 more free options

bolt.diy — Open-source, self-hostable bolt.new; BYO key.Dyad — Free local app builder; you bring your own API keys.Create.xyz — Free tier to build sites/tools from a prompt.Mocha — Free tier for AI-built full-stack apps.

Free AI chat & LLM API keys

Free chat, and free API keys to power the “bring-your-own-key” tools above — no paid inference needed to start.

Google Gemini / AI Studio

One of the most generous free APIs: ~1,500 requests/day on a frontier model. Free chat at gemini.google.com.

Groq

Very fast free API (Llama & others), ~1,000 requests/day. No credit card.

Cerebras

Fastest free inference (~1M tokens/day) on the wafer-scale chip.

Mistral

Free “Experiment” API tier (~1B tokens/month; you opt in to data training).

OpenRouter

One key for hundreds of models; ~50 free-model requests/day (1,000/day after a one-off $10 credit).

GitHub Models

Free access to many models for prototyping, using your GitHub account.

Claude (free)

Free chat tier at claude.ai for reasoning, writing and code.

ChatGPT (free)

Free chat tier at chatgpt.com.

+ 6 more free options

Cloudflare Workers AI — Free daily allowance of model inference on the edge.Together AI — Sign-up credits + some free/open models.Cohere — Free trial API keys (rate-limited) for text & embeddings.NVIDIA NIM (build.nvidia.com) — Free API credits to try many hosted models.SambaNova Cloud — Free fast inference tier for open models.Hugging Face Inference — Free tier of the serverless Inference API.

Cloud hosting & databases

Deploy and store data for free. For lowest latency, pick the Sydney/Melbourne region where offered.

Cloudflare (Workers/Pages/D1/R2/KV)

The most generous: 100k Worker requests/day, free D1 (SQLite), R2 object storage, KV, and Pages hosting.

🇦🇺 Edge PoPs in Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, Brisbane, Adelaide

Vercel

Free Hobby plan: unlimited frontend/static deploys, global CDN, GitHub CI.

Netlify

Free static / JAMstack hosting with serverless functions.

Supabase

Free Postgres + auth + storage + edge functions.

🇦🇺 Sydney region available

Neon

Free serverless Postgres with database branching.

🇦🇺 Sydney (ap-southeast-2) region

Render

Free web services (they sleep when idle) + a free Postgres for 90 days.

🇦🇺 Singapore is the nearest region

Fly.io

Small always-on allowances; deploy machines close to users.

🇦🇺 Sydney (syd) region

Hugging Face Spaces

Free hosting for ML demos and small apps (Gradio/Streamlit/Docker).

AWS / Google Cloud / Azure

Free tiers + sign-up credits across all three. Watch for charges once the trial/credits end.

🇦🇺 Sydney + Melbourne regions on all three

+ 9 more free options

Oracle Cloud Always Free — Very generous: up to 4 Arm OCPUs + 24 GB RAM + 200 GB storage, forever. · 🇦🇺 Sydney & Melbourne regions Deno Deploy — Free edge hosting for JS/TS with a global network.Koyeb — Free serverless web service + tiny always-on instance.Railway — Trial credits (not truly free ongoing) with great DX.Turso — Free distributed SQLite (libSQL) with generous limits.Upstash — Free serverless Redis, Vector, QStash & Search.MongoDB Atlas — Free M0 cluster (512 MB) — hosted MongoDB. · 🇦🇺 Sydney region Convex — Free reactive backend + database for full-stack apps.Appwrite Cloud — Free open-source backend (auth, DB, storage, functions).

Free compute & GPUs

Notebooks and GPUs for training, fine-tuning and ML experiments — no credit card.

Google Colab

Free NVIDIA T4 (16 GB) notebooks, roughly 15–30 GPU-hours/week.

Kaggle

Free P100 or 2×T4, plus TPU — a fixed ~30 GPU-hours/week, and thousands of datasets.

Hugging Face Spaces (ZeroGPU)

Shared H200 access for building and hosting GPU demos.

Lightning AI

Free cloud IDE with ~15 monthly credits (~80 GPU-hours on interruptible machines).

+ 5 more free options

Modal — $30/month recurring credits (no card to start) on T4–H100 serverless GPUs.Paperspace Gradient — Free-tier GPU notebooks, no credit card.AWS SageMaker Studio Lab — Free CPU/GPU notebooks (note: new sign-ups close 30 Jul 2026).Saturn Cloud — Free monthly compute hours for notebooks.Google TPU Research Cloud — Free TPU access for approved research projects.

Student packs & learning

Extra freebies with a university email, plus free curricula. Most AU universities qualify.

GitHub Student Developer Pack

A big bundle of free tools & credits (including Copilot Pro free while you study).

JetBrains for Students

All JetBrains IDEs free with a student email.

Microsoft Azure for Students

$100 of Azure credit (usable on GPU VMs), no credit card.

freeCodeCamp

Free full-stack, data & ML curricula with certifications.

The Odin Project

Free, project-based full-stack web dev curriculum.

MDN / Microsoft Learn / Google Cloud Skills Boost

Free reference docs and structured courses from the platform vendors.

+ 4 more free options

fast.ai — Free, practical deep-learning course (top-tier).Kaggle Learn — Free bite-sized courses on Python, ML, SQL & more.Hugging Face Learn — Free courses on LLMs, agents, diffusion & RL.AWS Skill Builder — Free cloud & AI courses from AWS.