Cloud credits are promotional compute or API allowances given by a cloud provider to new users, startups, or research projects. They lower the cost of testing services by letting an account run workloads or make API calls before full billing begins. In security terms, credits matter because they are a valuable, transferable resource: once an account is trusted enough to receive them, that account can be used to consume real infrastructure at little or no cost.
Attackers target cloud credits by creating synthetic identities, abusing signup flows, or rotating accounts to collect many small allowances. The result can be fraud, quota exhaustion, and gray-market resale of access to AI or compute services. Defenders reduce this risk with stronger identity checks, billing verification, organization-bound issuance, usage telemetry, and limits on how much promotional capacity a single actor can accumulate. Credit programs are useful for adoption, but they become a security boundary when fraud rings turn them into a source of subsidized access.