What to do with unused AI and cloud credits before they expire
Most cloud and AI credits can't be sold, so the real question is how to get value from them before the expiry date. A practical list by provider and workload.
If you hold a balance of AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, OpenAI or Anthropic credit that you won't burn through in time, you have three options: sell it, let it expire, or use it on something worth doing. The first is mostly closed. AWS, Anthropic and OpenAI prohibit transfer in their published terms, and Google Cloud and Azure restrict it in other ways (details here). That leaves using it well. This guide is about how.
Start with the dates, not the balance
Every credit line has its own expiry, and a single headline balance often hides several grants ending months apart. Before planning anything, list each line with its remaining value, expiry date and the services it covers. Our guide to when cloud and AI credits expire shows where to find this on each platform.
Then compare each line with your current burn rate. The gap between what you'll spend anyway and what expires is the amount you actually need a plan for. It's often much smaller than the headline number.
Work worth pulling forward
The best use of expiring credit is work you would pay for eventually but keep postponing.
For AI credits (OpenAI, Anthropic)
- Evaluation suites. Build and run the evals you keep meaning to write. They'll keep paying off after the credit is gone.
- Backfills. Summarise, classify, tag or extract from the archive of documents, tickets or transcripts you've never processed.
- Embeddings. Re-embed a corpus with a newer model, or embed the data you've left out of search.
- Synthetic and test data. Generate fixtures, edge cases and test conversations for your product.
- Batch it. Both providers offer batch processing for offline work, and it usually costs less per request, so the same balance covers more.
For cloud credits (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud)
- Migrations and refactors that need temporary duplicate environments, such as moving to a new database version or region.
- Load and resilience testing at a scale you'd never normally pay for.
- Data reprocessing: rebuild warehouses, recompute aggregates, reindex search.
- Training and fine-tuning runs that are covered by the credit's scope. Check the scope first, because some credits exclude certain services or marketplace products.
- Disaster-recovery rehearsals: restore from backups into a clean environment and prove the process works.
What not to do with it
- Don't hand out keys or logins to someone who offers to "use it for you" in exchange for cash. That's a transfer by another name, and their usage becomes your liability.
- Don't buy long commitments with it without checking that the credit actually applies to them. Many credits exclude reservations, savings plans or support plans.
- Don't spin up resources you'll forget about. When the credit expires, anything still running starts billing your card.
Ask the provider
If the balance is large, especially programme or enterprise credit, ask your provider contact before it expires. Extensions and changes aren't published, but people do ask for them, and the answer is sometimes yes.
Closing a company with credit left
A wind-down changes the question, because the credit goes wherever the account goes. Our wind-down checklist covers what to record and who to ask.
When a sale might be possible
A small number of arrangements are permitted, usually tied to the credit's specific terms or to a corporate transaction. If you'd like an honest read on whether yours is one of them, submit the details and a person will reply within 24–48 hours. If the answer is no, we'll say so and suggest where your balance is best spent.