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Comment by cperciva | Hacker News Reader

$5,000 in hosting credits in terms of their time and effort is not a compelling reason to do office hours.

Really? Are you able to produce more than $5000 of value for your startup in 20 minutes?

Office hours provides way more insightful and long term value than some free server hours.

For the people YC wants to talk to, sure. But dangling $5000 of AWS credits in front of people may attract people they don't want to talk to.

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But it isn't just the 20 minutes, it's the transaction costs of transportation and interrupting your day. What if you choose to travel from a couple hours away, or even very far away?

Well, I'm assuming that people who just want the $5000 would sign up to do this over skype.

> Really? Are you able to produce more than $5000 of value for your startup in 20 minutes?

Hosting credits are not currency. Most startups will never need anything close to $5000 in AWS credits.

Not to mention that AWS basically gives them out like candy. I have several grand in AWS credit just from attending hackathons and conferences.

> Most startups will never need anything close to $5000 in AWS credits.

This statement is not true. It is quite easy to have a $5,000 a month bill on Amazon.

Also, AWS credits usually last 12 months. You can spend $416.67/month at AWS with just one EC2 instance.

It might be easy, but that doesn't mean it happens to the vast majority of startups.

The majority of startups never get any real traction and see only a small trickle of traffic every day.

I suspect that developing and deploying something that extracts value from $5000 worth of hosting will require non-trivial effort. Even reselling them would require some effort for anyone for whom reselling AWS credits was not a regular activity.

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