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Comment by primax | Hacker News Reader

Unless you are prepared to pay for 100% of your cloud costs, seed funding or accelerator acceptance is required for the ~100k in credits that the major cloud providers offer to startups.

There are light accelerators out there that take no equity, just a first right of refusal of funding kinda arrangement.

(Now queue the HN cloud haters telling me I can run anything on 3 raspberryPis or something)

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Am I a hater if I say I run the sideline saas product I made in the cloud for €20 per month? I bring in a modest 4 figure MRR. You don't need a 100k or an accelerator. You need an accelerator if you want to go big quickly...and you probably won't...so back to starting with make something and have a go.

Cloud costs, basic incorporation fees, etc are nothing compared to labor costs, for example, or what it will cost to keep a roof over your head while you build out your product and get traction. Those credits et al are peanuts by comparison.

To be clear - my original comment wasn't really intended to disparage incubators, accelerators, etc, but rather to say that you can spend a lot of time playing the whole startup game where often you are better off to just keep your head down and focus on your own work.

Agreed. I wasn't disparaging incubators, accelerators either. I was on one and sort of admired the fact some people, with no tech skills, were having a go at making a tech business. I think those with tech skills should put the head down first as you say.

You absolutely don't need 100k in AWS credits to validate your idea and most web apps/SaaS APIs can be running on one or more Digital Ocean droplets at fairly low opex. AWS giving away cloud credits to startups is not unlike drug dealer handing out some free hits to new potential customers. They're not doing it out of goodness of their hearts.

A local incubator can also offer these cloud credits. Doesn’t need to be an accelerator…

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