Over the past month I shipped three entries to the Global AI Hackathon Series with Qwen Cloud — an autonomous bounty-hunting agent, a GitLab CI diagnosis agent, and an AI "showrunner" that turns one line of premise into a finished, subtitled vertical short-drama episode. All three run on the same card-free Qwen Cloud free-tier API key.
That last part matters. I'm in Malaysia, I don't put credit cards into cloud consoles for hackathons, and Qwen Cloud turned out to be one of the few platforms where a genuinely free, no-payment-method tier covers LLM, video, image and speech generation. This post is the map of the gotchas I hit so you don't have to.
Getting the key (the card-free path)
There are two signup flows and they look confusingly similar:
If any screen asks for a card, you're in the wrong flow — back out.
