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Comment by doomslice | Hacker News Reader

I was able to get 130k free GCP credits (over 3 years) just by filling out the startup forms... as a complete nobody. You don't even need an affiliate to sponsor you.

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I'm not saying anything for or against AWS or GCP. All I'm saying is most startups experience with AWS won't begin with "Send email to dedicated YC email address" so it's hard to draw conclusions from this article about what AWS support is like for "regular" start ups.

While I agree that this is a confound and as someone who also went through the same process, GCP also knows that you're applying as a YC company, and is a PITA regardless - in that way, there's a normalization factor of applying to both entities' startup credit programs with similar social factors. I've heard the same pains with GCP from non-YC founders about the free credits process and from non-YC technologists about bad customer service.

I worked briefly for a startup that changed their name and then got an additional round of credits.

Did you apply via https://cloud.google.com/startup?

I'm in a similar position and those credits would be lifechanging.

Yes, exactly.

The grants start out small (I think the first one was $3k) -- but then once you spend 75% of them you can apply for the next round, which for me they gave me $17k out of a possible $30k based on previous usage. After I spent around $15k for that over the next year I applied again and got $100k.

Just one note though that I already had an MVP that I was running on GCP at the time I applied (but I was within the $300 free credits that I started with so I didn't pay out of pocket).

What does GCP get in return. If they give you free credit, do you have to give then equity in your company, do you guarantee them X spend, etc?

If you have enough funds, you might not care about building an efficient architecture, and when the credits run out, you’ll spend more?

Also good PR.

If you hit it big, you’ll spend on their platform for a long time. You don’t have to explicitly promise anything because you’ve built everything around their platform for months/years.

Your future spend. Once you start using them, it would be a decent amount of work to change.

Moving clouds is hard if you use the cloud features. Giving credits to startups is a cheap way to get them locked in for the future.

probably vendor lock in

my understanding is that GCP has recently changed their startup programme. I applied a few weeks ago, and had the same bad service as the OP.

Oh you'll pay in the end.

Care to elaborate?

vendor lock-in. Good luck switching away from GCP once you're tied in to their cloud services. Might as well spend the VC money and not worry about moving.

How does spending VC money help with this? You will still inevitably end up getting locked into whatever company you use

How!? I am a VC backed startup, just went through the same grief described in the original linked post.

I like Firebase, but the moment the utility runs out we're heading back to AWS.

Maybe things have changed since I applied - but I have not talked to a single sales person and only communicated via email with the google cloud for startups team. The process was so quick and painless that I at some point felt like I was being scammed and had to make sure I was not going to end up with a huge bill after they pulled the rug out from under me.

> I like Firebase, but the moment the utility runs out we're heading back to AWS.

Just from a technical perspective I'd advise to avoid the firebase databases like the plague.

It's not too bad if you use the firebase store. But yeah using the firebase realtime db for anything that requires relationships/indexing can be kinda cumbersome.

> It's not too bad if you use the firebase store

I've built a prototype on top of it and it's fairly rudimentary but you can make it work. My biggest concern is that there are no case studies I can find of people using it past the prototype stage and how the pricing/scalability works out at that point.

We've spent a lot of time working around the limitations of FireStore, but it does work reliably. Pricing is VERY hard to extrapolate from early use; all it takes is one feature request and your assumptions are blown.

Love to hear from anyone who has gone beyond the prototype phase.

Why's that? I haven't looked into it but thought I might someday.

In 2015 I worked at a start-up and was in charge of applying for various cloud start-up benefits at AWS, GCP, etc. At the time getting GCP credits was the hardest and required meeting with a program coordinator after getting a referral from an industry recognized VC. It may have changed since then, bottom line YMMV.

Are there similar forms for AWS? I got 100k credits for my prior YC startup but I'm exploring new projects for a possible future startup and if I could even get 10k credits it would be a big help.

That used to be the case. They recently (last year?) changed it to make it much harder.

If you're planning on building your business on the cloud, the availability of free credits seems like the worst way to evaluate a cloud provider. Generous "free" credits might even be a warning that they have to pay people to use the platform.

This ignores the other big reasons to take losses early, when one is a new(er) player in a market with a dominant competitor.

It's not completely wrong, but incomplete.

Doesn't the same logic apply -- that new upstart is unproven and is essentially paying people to use their platform. The last thing your burgeoning new business needs is trying to debug issues on a brand new platform, you can't even hire industry experts to help because there are no industry experts.

So if you want to work on building your business and not debug cloud provider issues, avoid the new upstart.

If you truly need cloud hosting then that is $130k of free money no? That's more than many pre-seed rounds. If you use that for a bunch of Linux machines running some kinda containers and a non-proprietary database then I don't see any downsides.

Interesting.

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