AWS or Google Cloud Startup Credits: How to Compare the Offers

Build a side-by-side sheet with these rows, and fill each cell from the provider's current terms:

• Eligibility: funding stage, accelerator or investor affiliation, company age and whether you've used credits before.
• Total value and tiers: how the amount is structured, and whether more can be earned later.
• Expiry: how long the credits last, and whether they expire on a fixed date regardless of use.
• Covered services: whether credits apply to all services, or exclude marketplace purchases, support plans, domains or certain AI and third-party services.
• Support: whether technical support or training is included, or excluded from credit use.
• Approval process: how long it takes, and what documentation you need.
• Stacking: whether credits from an accelerator, an investor or a partner program combine.

The exclusions decide the value. A large credit that can't be applied to the services you use is worth less than a smaller one that can.

Do the arithmetic before you commit an architecture:

1. Estimate your monthly bill at list price for the stack you'd build on each cloud.
2. Divide the usable credit amount by that monthly figure to get months of free runway.
3. Subtract the months the credit would sit unused because of a slow start or an expiry date that arrives first.
4. Note the month credits expire, and estimate the bill after.

Say your stack costs about $4,000 a month at list price and the credit is usable across all of it. Credits last only as long as either the balance or the expiry date allows, so a slow first year may leave credits unused, while a fast-growing one may drain them in a few months. Track the burn monthly against the expiry so you're never surprised.

Free money changes behavior. Watch for these traps:

• Choosing by credit, not fit: picking the cloud with the larger credit and then fighting its tooling for years. Choose on team skills and fit first, then use credits as a tiebreaker. The three-cloud comparison covers fit.
• Proprietary services everywhere: each managed service that has no easy equivalent raises the cost of moving later.
• Overprovisioning: oversized instances and forgotten test environments that would hurt at list price feel harmless while credits last.
• No cost visibility: credits hide bills, so teams skip tagging and budgets until it's late.

Use the cost optimization checklist from the start, and keep spending visible at list price alongside the credit-adjusted view.

Credits are temporary, but the bill is not. To prepare:

• Tag resources by owner and environment on day one, so you can see who drives cost.
• Set a budget alert at list price, not credit-adjusted, and review it monthly.
• Rehearse the post-credit bill about three months before expiry: right-size, delete idle resources and price out commitments on your steady baseline.
• Decide in advance whether you'll stay on the cloud or move. Moving takes months for a real product, so the decision needs lead time.

For a sense of scale once you're paying, the median private B2B SaaS company's hosting spending is about 5% of ARR¹. If your projected post-credit bill is far above that share of your revenue plan, you have an architecture or pricing problem to fix before credits end.

Use a short decision rule. First, confirm you qualify for each program and read the exclusions. Second, choose the cloud your team can operate best, since operational skill saves more than any credit. Third, if the two are close, take the offer with broader service coverage and the longer usable window. Fourth, avoid signing multi-year commitments while credits are still flowing, and keep your data portable enough to leave. If you use a managed database, see how the choice interacts with lock-in in the managed database comparison, and compare against the wider AWS versus Google Cloud guide.