Comment by jamiesonbecker | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jamiesonbecker | Hacker News Reader

Google offers $300 in credit that you can use on anything you like for one year as soon as you sign up right off the bat, and AWS has offered the Free Tier almost since inception.

For startups, Google[1], Amazon[2], Microsoft BizSpark[3], OVH Digital Launch Pad[4], Digital Ocean[5], have startup programs that you can apply to with varying amounts of service credit (usually expiring afer one year). (Don't write off OVH: theirs seems to be the smallest, but their stuff is by far the highest value.. 2GB instances for $3.49/month and great DDoS protection; however, their cloud dashboard takes a little time to get used to, but seems pretty powerful once into it.)

1. $20k to $100k in service credits @ Google: https://cloud.google.com/developers/startups/

2. $5k at Amazon, $15k in accelerators: https://aws.amazon.com/activate/

3. Up to $120k at Microsoft: https://bizspark.microsoft.com/

4. $500 to $100k at OVH: https://www.ovh.com/us/dlp/

5. up to $100k at Digital Ocean (not sure if this is actually launched yet -- we applied for https://userify.com but never heard back): https://www.digitalocean.com/hatch/

I really want to apply to Google. But unfortunately, my startup doesn't qualify due to not being in an approved VC fund, Accelerator, or Incubator.

Does anyone know of any program, that does not require me to give any equity? So that I may join and get the Google credits?

If you know someone that works for Google they can internally recommend you as well.

For real?

Good to know :)

Also keep in mind that most of these credits usually expire after one year, so definitely have a solid plan to get profitable before they run out.

Startup School Founders Track, but the 1st session is already underway; there will certainly be many more.

Wait .. is this the track where you get a mentor or does it include the "follow along" track as well?

Not sure, I think they're both named the same... But the deals from Google / AWS / Azure are only available to startups that have been accepted (that have access to mentors, office hours, etc.)

If you have funding from some sort of fund or incubator, you can also ask your investors to talk to Google. (Our investors weren't on the official list, but we talked to them, and then Google put them on the list.)

Find someone who's connected. We got credits despite not being a real start-up at all.

Isn't Google's $300 credit only valid for 2 months?

Nope, 12 months: https://cloud.google.com/free/

In addition, the $300 is only for expenses in excess of the "Always Free" usage limits, which covers quite a bit of stuff, including 5 gigs of cloud storage, 1 micro compute engine instance, and a terabyte of BigQuery queries per month.

(disclaimer: I work at Google)

Shouldn't that be "source" rather than "disclaimer"?

People 'disclaim' all sorts of funny things here.

I think it was more of a disclosure...

Yeah, "full disclosure" would have worked fine.

Why did it used to be 2 months? When did it change?

It absolutely used to be 2 months, otherwise, my account would still be able to use those 300$ credits. But I just checked, it can't. I still have the expiration email if you want.

I too remember only getting 2 months to use them- I signed up sometime Nov/Dec 2016. Guess they changed it fairly recently.

They changed roughly one month ago. I was still with a little bit of credit left and instead of expiring they told me that was extended

It changes on a whim. Like anything google, some people are probably still seeing 2 months because they are in some bucket or something. Who knows?

Building on google stuff is as risky as building on apple's.

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