Editorial Policy

Last updated: November 2, 2026

This page explains how CloudAPIcredits chooses and verifies offers and writes reviews. It is the standard we hold ourselves to and the one you can hold us to.

1. Which offers we list

We list only mechanisms a provider itself issues: free trials, signup credits, startup, research and education programs, referral bonuses, affiliate-exclusive trial bonuses, published free tiers and official discounts. We do not list resold or transferred credits, accounts that come with a balance, shared API keys, or promotional codes that were leaked or that a provider issued to a closed group. If a submitted offer looks like any of those, we decline it, and if one slips through we remove it as soon as we see it.

We do not charge providers to be listed, and a provider cannot pay to be excluded from a comparison.

2. How we verify offers

Every offer marked "Verified" on the Site was checked by a member of our team on the date shown next to it. The check is the same every time:

1. Open the provider's official page for the offer (pricing page, program page, documentation or terms) in a clean browser session with no stored cookies, from a US location.
2. Record the credit amount, validity period, eligibility conditions, covered services and any payment-method requirement exactly as the page states them, and save a screenshot of the page with its date.
3. Where the offer can be claimed without an application, create a test account, follow the signup flow through our own link, and record what the provider granted, how long it took to appear and what the console showed.
4. Where the offer requires an application, record the published criteria and the provider's stated review time, and mark the offer "Page verified" rather than "Claim verified".
5. Record the provider, offer, date, time, checker initials and result in our verification log.

An offer that fails this check is not published. An offer that passes is published with its verification date, its known conditions (new accounts only, card required, specific models or regions, application needed) and the figures we actually saw.

3. Re-checking and removal

Offers on pages that receive paid traffic are re-checked at least every seven days. All other offers are re-checked at least every 30 days and whenever a reader reports a problem. When a re-check fails, we mark the offer expired within one business day. If a provider tells us an offer has ended, we mark it the same day.

Expired offers are not deleted silently. For 30 days they appear in an "Expired" section at the bottom of the page with the last date they were live, so a reader who saw the offer elsewhere knows it is gone. After that they move to the log only.

Offers submitted by readers go through the same check before publication. Reader reports that an offer failed are checked within one business day; if we can reproduce the failure, the offer is marked expired.

4. Who writes and checks

Our writers and checkers are employees and contractors of {{COMPANY_LEGAL_NAME}} who run their own workloads and pay their own API bills, and who have held accounts with every provider we cover. Each review names its author. We do not accept content written by providers, their agencies or public relations firms, and we do not publish paid articles presented as editorial. We use software to help draft and check text, but a named person checks every offer, decides every rating, and is responsible for every page.

5. Independence from commissions

We earn a commission if you sign up or spend through our links. It does not change your credit or your price, and it does not change our ratings. The specific rules:

• Checkers and writers do not see commission rates for the providers they review.
• Ratings, pricing figures and the "best for" verdicts in comparisons are decided before anyone looks at what a provider pays.
• Commission can affect the order of comparable verified offers, as the Affiliate Disclosure explains. It cannot affect whether an offer is listed, whether it is marked verified, or its rating. There is no pay-to-rank.
• No provider reviews, approves or previews our content. When a provider disputes a fact, we re-check it against their published terms and correct it if we were wrong; we do not change opinions on request.
• Sponsored placements, if we run any, are labeled under the Advertising Policy and are never counted in ratings.

6. How ratings are formed

Each provider rating is built from five parts, weighted as shown:

• Value of the entry offer (30%): the credit amount, how long it lasts, what it covers, and how many readers can realistically qualify.
• Price after the credit (25%): list prices for a basket of common workloads, re-sampled quarterly from the provider's pricing page.
• Transparency (20%): whether pricing, quotas and rate limits are published in full, whether billing alerts and hard caps exist, and whether the terms say clearly what happens when the credit runs out.
• Onboarding (15%): how long it took our test account to get a working key and a visible credit, and whether a card was required.
• Support and documentation (10%): response times and outcomes from our own support contacts over the past six months, and the quality of the docs.

Scores are rounded to the nearest half star. The methodology is reviewed every January, and changes are noted at the bottom of each review.

7. Where pricing and policy figures come from

Per-token and per-hour prices, free-tier allowances, rate limits, credit validity and program criteria are taken from each provider's own pricing page, documentation, program page and terms, and from what we observed in our test accounts. Each figure on a review page is dated and links to the page it came from. Where a provider does not publish a figure, we report what we saw in our test account and say so. Where a figure varies by model, region or tier, we say so rather than guess. We do not use figures from other deal sites or from press coverage without checking them against the provider.

8. Update cadence

• Offers on paid-traffic pages: re-checked every 7 days.
• All other offers: re-checked every 30 days.
• Pricing figures and program summaries: re-checked every 90 days and whenever a provider announces a change.
• Provider ratings: re-sampled quarterly.
• Full review rewrite: at least once a year.

The "Last verified" date on each page is the date of the most recent offer check on that page, not the date the page was last edited.

9. Corrections

When we get something wrong, we fix it and say so. Factual errors are corrected as soon as we confirm them, usually within one business day, and a dated correction note is added to the page. Typos and formatting fixes are made without a note. If an error appeared in an ad or a social post, we correct the post and pause the ad. We do not remove pages to hide errors.

10. How to report an error

Email {{CONTACT_EMAIL}} with the URL, what you think is wrong and, if you have it, a link to the provider page that shows the correct information. We reply within two business days. If you work for a provider and believe a figure about you is out of date, write from a company address and point us to the current page; that is the fastest route to a fix.

11. Contact

{{COMPANY_LEGAL_NAME}}, {{STREET_ADDRESS}}, {{SUITE_OR_UNIT}}, {{CITY}}, TX {{ZIP}}, United States. Editorial questions and corrections: {{CONTACT_EMAIL}}.