Startup pack gives away $10k worth of tools to new businesses

Actually in the UK it's an encouraged thing by HMRC.

HMRC would rather see you invoice a company for £5k and then to write it off as a gift, than to not see records at all.

In the case of giving to charities via this method, the government will go so far as to give you a benefit on your declared level of corporate tax as a direct result of giving something to a charity and invoicing in this way.

You might internally consider that to be a marketing activity, or a social/community/sustainability activity, but the government cares not... they strongly want to see benefits and gifts recorded and will (in some cases such as charities, non-profits, etc) will reward you by taking less tax.

That's UK specific of course, but point is: the UK government and tax office don't view it as tacky. And it's a good business incentive to offer such benefits to charities and other specified types of organisation.

Example: Textmaster is a marketplace for copywriting & translating. Do you think that they could offer some "debian authors"? No, because they have to pay them, otherwise it would be slavery.

It is logic assign a value to the service that is offered. Tens or hundreds of thousands of businesses pay for these services. What they are paying is the value.

When you issue a coupon to offer free access to a service, you don't write it off as a marketing expense... At least, this is not what we're doing at Mailjet. And I don't think it's possible for anyone to do this, it would make things a bit too easy ^^

Imagine: "Hey friend, here's a coupon for 1000 billion emails, it doesn't matter if you don't use it, just activate the coupon so I can write the value off, this way, there won't be any benefits this year."