We saw it advertised as 90% off on a startup platform we're part of, applied, and we were told since we're a bootstrapped business and haven't raised any money, we can only get 30% off.
It left a sour taste in my mouth.
If you're bootstrapping a business counting every penny of your own money, you're at disadvantage, but if you raised $2 million, we're happy to save some of your VC money!
Datadog did something similar to me at a previous company- they were miserable. We tried to use their credits from the AWS program, but then they kept adding more and more requirements to the program. They eventually wanted to go full MLM, telling us that if we want the credits we have to setup meetings with other startups we work with and that at least three (I believe) of the startups had to turn into customers.
It was absolutely ridiculous. I went from being eager to use their product to vowing never to recommend it again. They were just so condescending during the entire process too.
The whole VC startup/tech bubble needs external money to go into the system.
They aren't very interested in taking VC-funded companies money because it will be like taking something out of your right pocket and putting it into the left one - it doesn't do anything to prevent the bubble from popping.
External money (from outside the bubble) however is very important since it's the only thing that will stave off the eventual cascading failure of the industry as all these unsustainable companies (who mostly just pass their VC money back & forth) start falling like dominoes.
It makes a lot of sense to offer a service for free (as a customer acquisition tactic) to a VC funded company because the 2 options are either they go bankrupt or they can be charged 100 times more revenue in 2 years.
On the other hand what is the point of subsidising a bootstrapped business potentially forever?
My experience with bootstrapped companies is that they are just as subject to pressure to grow as startups, and probably have a higher success rate.
Atlassian, Github, Mailchimp and Shopify are all companies that initially started as bootstrapped companies and, in my mind, stand out as some of the most sustainably successful startups of recent history.
But when they were early stage, which is when the discounts being discussed apply, they were bootstrapped companies.
Parent's argument is that bootstrapped companies are dramatically less likely to ever grow and that only VC backed early stage companies are, therefore it makes no economic sense to provide discounts to bootstrapped early stage companies.
My point is that I don't believe that this holds out in the data that expected long term value of a bootstrapped company is significantly lower than a VC invested on.
Personally, I find there is ample evidence that "VCs largely are just handing money around to each other to give the illusion of growth" is a solid hypothesis.
I don't get this -- it's obvious -- boot strapped companies are lean and will likely stay lean and be at best a small business. VC companies burn to get big -- and will spend big to get there. And likely fail. But spend a lot to fail. The offering makes total sense if you understand the market -- I don't know why so many boostrappers are so stubbornly against just how reality works.
Heh, was kinda thinking the same, it's a circle of money.
"Look at our hockeystick! We got customers equivalent to a million MRR!"
"Equivalent? How much are they actually paying?"
"...nothing, they're all in our VC batch. But hey, we also get service X for free in return!"
I suppose it makes sense if you consider that the purpose of these programs is to acquire customers that will potentially scale dramatically in size (and usage of the platform) in upcoming years. Bootstrapped businesses may not look to them like the future cash cows they’re seeking. It’s unfortunate.
It basically means VC money is a get out of jail free card for a lot of early potential mistakes and miscalculations you can make while working out how much it will cost you to build your business on the back of AWS and how that affects your own pricing model… and the 100x ratio is just rubbing phosphorus into the wound and what elevates this to just insulting to me, it’s one thing to have a 50% or 100% difference in the amount of discount you get (like the already stated example where the VC funds mean you get 90% off, and the bootstrapped customer gets only 30%, that’s a 200% greater discount)
With the 100x on the free AWS credits that’s the equivalent of 10000% discount to the VC funded customer… and when I know that bullshit half baked ideas by people with good networking connections in California are getting a discount like that while I’m working hard to build some sort of legitimate business with my own money… it just feels like Amazon saying “fuck you we don’t want your real business we just want these idiots with their fake business”… it’s not a good vibe to give off.
At a guess I expect its because the VC has vetted the business model and saves amazon from doing the same. e.g. if accel, a16z etc have stumped up seed money or an A-round it means the company would have a tested model, or at least one sufficient for them to throw serious amounts of money at. This saves amazon from having to do the same and allocate resources to vet the founders and startup themselves.
yeah vetting is big part of it. Like imagine the amount of applications they get from all over the world. This kind of things changes as the cloud providers get bigger and bigger too. If you use say Oracle now they kind of want to hear from earlier stage startups.
Just be aware that some of these freebies might cost you more in the long run. I remember signing up to mongoHQ/Compose.io when we started, because they had a nice 1800USD credit.
Later on while using it, they just said emm you got enough out of it, time to charge you 18USD per GB per month, starting today.
It was quite painful to migrate down the line, but you could say we deserved it.
We went "gotta catch them all" on all the free shit in the early days.
True, but I think that's the point for many of the companies making these offers. An good upfront deal with a plan to secure a big customer in the future if the startup works out.
- Google Firebase Hosting for your static front-ends
- Google Cloud Run Services for your APIs
- Google Cloud Run Jobs for long running compute (more than doubles your Cloud Run monthly free compute grant if you can move some compute workloads into a Job)
- Google Firestore for anything that doesn't benefit from being relational
- Supabase for anything that benefits from being relational and/or you need a vector DB.
You can get pretty far with this combo without paying more than a few cents a month and you don't compromise on scalability nor portability (excluding Firestore).
(I'd avoid Cloud Functions because the cold starts are abysmal and you'll end up paying a small fee for warm instances for anything that is latency sensitive; proper Cloud Run at least has a CPU boost option that seems to help).
what about the cold start? i've worked on a project that uses cloud run to serve up a django app. has a terrible cold start. it gets a little better if you script a ping but it's still noticeable
I use it with .NET 7 and cold starts are acceptable for me.
Part of that is enabling the CPU Boost since .NET and Java are both JIT runtimes. The CPU Boost seems like -- seat of the pants -- about a 50% reduction in cold start times.
You can give the CPU Boost a try and see if it makes a difference, but it may also be dependent on your framework's startup flow.
Gen 2 Cloud Functions are deployed into Cloud Run.
But you end up with an abstraction layer (Functions) that adds to the startup cost and less control over the configuration.
There are some benefits like ease of local development and testing since it integrates really nicely into the emulator suite and also integrates handling of authz/authn into the pipeline. But otherwise, I'd recommend Cloud Run for more portability and better control over parameters that affect cost and performance.
To expand, you'll get either 100k credits that expire after 1 year or two chunks of 50k credits across 2 years. You also get a lot of support rep help, our rep pointed us to a few solutions that saved us thousands a month, for example.
YC startupschool has a huge package if I remember, maybe I should say a big pool instead, of internal and external offers and freebies. I think its only a few writing exercises and video meetings with other founders in terms of showing up
yeah they did before everything burned. mercury is their only real competition that is similar but they're all online only. no perks that i know of really.
We split out cloud costs using the free tier for google cloud and aws. So all of us kind of pool our resources together so that we keep costs low across accounts.
then the key thing is when we reach our for services that you would normally have to pay for we explicitly ask if they have a bootstrapped program. like we tell them we're bootstrapped and as what they can do for us:
Pangea provides a comprehensive framework of essential API-based security services (think authN, authZ, audit logging and vaulting; as well as more advanced and/or use-case services like PII redaction; embargo; and threat intelligence functionalities) to add security to applications quickly.
We have a startup program which provides Seed to Series A startups with complimentary access to ourAPIs for the first year (or up to $5,000 USD whichever comes first) as well as mentoring and community support.
Thank you for sparking this discussion. I'm with Gumlet, a platform dedicated to the optimized delivery of videos and images at scale. We're excited to introduce our startup deals program which grants a substantial 75% discount on your monthly bills for the first year, followed by a 50% discount during the second year. Discover more at https://www.gumlet.com/startups/.
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I strongly recommend the Microsoft for Startups [1] program. They’ve been providing us with hundreds of thousands of Azure credits and other Microsoft technologies (even OpenAI credits!)
They have a tiered system and you need to apply using LinkedIn but hey, it’s a lot of stuff after all and they’ve been adding stuff consistently for the past year or so.
Vectara Startup Partnerships program empowers startups to infuse GenAI functionality into development of Startup solution/MVP offerings. The program offers exclusive access to Vectara’s GenAI enterprise features, financial incentive with discounts and up to $5K platform credits, and a tailored success journey to enable startup success. vectara.com/startups
We saw it advertised as 90% off on a startup platform we're part of, applied, and we were told since we're a bootstrapped business and haven't raised any money, we can only get 30% off.
It left a sour taste in my mouth.
If you're bootstrapping a business counting every penny of your own money, you're at disadvantage, but if you raised $2 million, we're happy to save some of your VC money!
¯\_(ツ)_/¯