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.
What companies offer noteworthy discounts or startup programs for bootstrappers?
61–70 of 75 posts
Re: What companies offer noteworthy discounts or startup programs for bootstrappers?
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
I always found this one rather insulting. 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…
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.
Re: What companies offer noteworthy discounts or startup programs for bootstrappers?
#63Just 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"…
whoa. good to know.
Re: What companies offer noteworthy discounts or startup programs for bootstrappers?
#64On Google Cloud, the secret sauce seems to be: - 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…
good summary. I've used a bunch of this stack.
Re: What companies offer noteworthy discounts or startup programs for bootstrappers?
#65Silicon Valley Bank used to have a huge menu of credits or discounts for SaaSes etc, including a significant credit for AWS. Have any other banks recreated that kind of program?
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.
Re: What companies offer noteworthy discounts or startup programs for bootstrappers?
#66Here's my current stack for our sales startup:
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.
We're getting some stuff going with AI so we just use everything that's open source on huggingface:
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:
We use this for customer outreach for example https://customer.io/startup-program/bootstrapped/
Re: What companies offer noteworthy discounts or startup programs for bootstrappers?
#67On Google Cloud, the secret sauce seems to be: - 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…
> Cloud Functions I think I read somewhere that Cloud Functions are just Cloud Run under the hood anyways, so just use Cloud Run lol.
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.
Re: What companies offer noteworthy discounts or startup programs for bootstrappers?
#68On Google Cloud, the secret sauce seems to be: - 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…
> Google Cloud Run Services for your APIs 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.
Re: What companies offer noteworthy discounts or startup programs for bootstrappers?
#69AWS has exclusive discounts for those in their startup credits program (AWS activate).
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.
I'm referring to credits for ISV solutions such-as DataDog, Splunk by being in the AWS Activate program.
Re: What companies offer noteworthy discounts or startup programs for bootstrappers?
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
Errr all these companies eventually took VC
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…
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.