11–20 of 40 posts
Before you take pre-seed funding - no references, just a web site and some traffic.
After a 6-figure pre-seed? (Is the start-up credits still available?)
Also, do AWS/GCP require exclusivity wrt to other clouds ?
> Postmark - If you’ve launched your product, are charging for it, and haven’t taken outside investment, contact the Postmark support team and they'll give you $75 account credit to help with your email costs.
A lot of these discounts are based on the assumption that you're a VC-backed, or about-to-be-VC-backed startup, that will have enough runway and growth to stick around for a couple years, and will smoothly transition from a steep discount to a 4-digit monthly bill around the time you land your Series A or whatever. I like Postmark's because it's much more reasonable - "you _don't_ have VC money, but you have an obvious path to making money (and thus being able to pay us), so we'll give you some credit for free as you get up and running."
I've been totally freeloading for a side project of mine that I _don't_ expect to make any money, but in researching cheap plans I came across a lot of these sorts of discounts (usually while looking to see if they had an open source discount, since my side project is open source). It's an interesting gamble, but I respect Postmark's the most, I think.
Postmark has the most interesting credit IMO, even if it's not a particularly huge one: > Postmark - If you’ve launched your product, are charging for it, and haven’t taken outside investment, contact the Postmark support team and they'll give you $75 account credit to help with your email costs. A lot of these discounts are based on the assumption that you're a VC-backed, or about-to-be-VC-backed startup, that will…
Credit on the other hand runs out when you actually use it, so is much more likely to coincide with you being ready to pay for the service.
When is a good time to apply to AWS/GCP credits? Before you take pre-seed funding - no references, just a web site and some traffic. After a 6-figure pre-seed? (Is the start-up credits still available?) Also, do AWS/GCP require exclusivity wrt to other clouds ?
Sometimes they require you to have a VC or accelerator intro for the higher tiers but you may be able to get around it if you know the right people.
In particular the hosting credits really lets you play around with dev without breaking the bank.
In most cases startups utilize AWS and GCP and they are generally really good, but both DO's Hatch and IBM a lot of people are missing out.
DO is awesome for startups without really good devops since they streamline a lot of the config work so it helps a lot getting the basics set up. We have a lot our free user plans on DO because it's much more cost effective and predictable (pricing wise) than AWS and GC.
IBM is also useful in a different use case because of their easy to setup dedicated hardware servers. 10k per month buys a lot of dedicated hardware (esp GPU) if you need it which is a godsend for us since we do a lot of ML and performance is dramatically better than any of the g/p instances on AWS.
This is a really helpful list! I didn't know that I could get a year of Zendesk for free [1], or a year of Intercom at $49/mo [2]. I'm using Drift for live chat, but I want to switch to Intercom or Zendesk to have support tickets (or "team inbox"), and a help center / knowledge base. I saw that Intercom is much more expensive than Zendesk, but noticed that most startups use them. Saw this on their marketing site: "84…
Hello. I would suggest taking a look at Crisp. I find it very intuitive and useful. More power isn't always needed. https://crisp.chat/en/
Postmark has the most interesting credit IMO, even if it's not a particularly huge one: > Postmark - If you’ve launched your product, are charging for it, and haven’t taken outside investment, contact the Postmark support team and they'll give you $75 account credit to help with your email costs. A lot of these discounts are based on the assumption that you're a VC-backed, or about-to-be-VC-backed startup, that will…
I also like how it's credit rather than a time-limited plan. Some projects might not take off in 3-months? 12? Especially if it's 1 person working in their spare time, having a bunch of trials running out is pressure you don't need. Credit on the other hand runs out when you actually use it, so is much more likely to coincide with you being ready to pay for the service.
That way, a startup won't get penalised for putting an MVP out there to get kick started, and the overall infrastructure costs to the provider isn't that high.
I think it is also fairer in situations where one startup may skyrocket to profitability in 3 months as opposed to another that takes 3 years to start paying the bills.
I think AWS is sort of on the right track with their free tier pricing, and it would be nice to see others adopt the same strategy.
(Though I think AWS fails in their startup credits rationale - as far as I can see, they only offer that to funded startups.)
When is a good time to apply to AWS/GCP credits? Before you take pre-seed funding - no references, just a web site and some traffic. After a 6-figure pre-seed? (Is the start-up credits still available?) Also, do AWS/GCP require exclusivity wrt to other clouds ?
The earlier the better. None of them have exclusivity but they do have requirements on funding. If you already raised too much it can be problematic, or if you're already a paying customer them switching to credits might require extra work. Sometimes they require you to have a VC or accelerator intro for the higher tiers but you may be able to get around it if you know the right people.
This is a really helpful list! I didn't know that I could get a year of Zendesk for free [1], or a year of Intercom at $49/mo [2]. I'm using Drift for live chat, but I want to switch to Intercom or Zendesk to have support tickets (or "team inbox"), and a help center / knowledge base. I saw that Intercom is much more expensive than Zendesk, but noticed that most startups use them. Saw this on their marketing site: "84…
I've used both on my startup (as well as Crisp) and ALL are excellent at what they do. It comes down to your use case. We ended up with Intercom because their user/company model fitted our SaaS (i.e. one user login could be associated with multiple subscriber companies) and we could easily filter by company or users to see total activity and provide support. Drift and Crisp were modelled on the 'one user, one company…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The earlier the better. None of them have exclusivity but they do have requirements on funding. If you already raised too much it can be problematic, or if you're already a paying customer them switching to credits might require extra work. Sometimes they require you to have a VC or accelerator intro for the higher tiers but you may be able to get around it if you know the right people.
GCP has a regular small startup program that doesn’t require that you have VC funding or specific accelerator backing. It isn’t nearly as much, but I got $1000 on top of the initial $300 for my bootstrap.