Hey there, I’m Ben 👋

If you’re new to my posts, I’m Ben - a solo founder building profitable software businesses.

If you’re not new, welcome back!

And either way, I hope you’re ready to learn how to save absolute boatloads of money and avoid handing over your life savings to ThE cLoUd — because I’m ready to save you quite literally tens of thousands of dollars in bills for your business.

This is an approach I came up with myself as I used it to save myself money when I was getting started with business a year or two ago, and now I’m sharing my approach with you.

So if you finish reading this and you’re happy with the tens of thousands of dollars I’ve almost certainly saved you, I’d like to suggest that you simply ☕️ buy me a coffee.

Otherwise, I did include a couple of affiliate links to relevant products that I personally use for this article. By clicking those links, it helps support me as I get a referral bonus — and you get benefits as well as I outline below.

Twelve thousand dollars?! You must be joking.

Not joking, this is a real thing. It’s even better than that: the $12K is only for cloud credits — you can also get $5K in free payment processing credits as a separate allotment.

As I said in the intro section, I can confirm that this works as it took me a couple years to build a product that started making money, and I’ve just now had to start paying bills after a couple years of experimentation using the exact approach I’ll outline in this article.

You don’t need VC funding to take advantage of this, and you don’t need to do any kind of vendor lock-in or use proprietary tools.

What I’m about to describe applies to everyone who has shipped a real software product with a working website, and AI-founders can definitely get the full $12K at least in 2025.

And if you’re not an AI founder? OK, you won’t get the full $12K, but you will get ~$7K of that plus the payment processing credits which is more than enough to cover many, many years of bills on its own.

I’ll explain what to do below and in what order.

But first, some qualifications

Let’s start with what qualifies you to get these credits. It’s really not very many requirements to meet at all.

You qualify for this if you’re a solo founder or a small team and:

1. You have your app deployed somewhere and you can demonstrate this with a live URL to your landing page. It needs to have screenshots of your app and be a real landing page which you’ll need anyway to sell to customers - so you probably have this covered already.

2. You’re willing to spend an hour of your time once every two years filling out applications for credits.

3. (Bonus) You’re building an AI-specific product.

The value behind meeting requirements 1 and 2 alone is $7,000 in cloud credits expiring in 2 years + up to $2,000 in credits from another provider + $5,000 in payment processing credits. Pretty great on its own. That’s $7K cloud + $5K payment processing.

🤑 But if you satisfy requirement 3, you’ll get those credits + another $5,000 in cloud credits + $2,000 in additional cloud credits on a different provider! That’s $12K cloud + $5K payment processing.

Even better, if you’re able to apply for multiple cloud credits and sequence them properly, you will have enough credits to last you something like 6 years if your usage remains constant (but hopefully it doesn’t and your startup takes off before then).

Let’s get started.

Where do these credits come from then?

This approach takes advantage of credits from multiple well known companies:

• AWS

  • Recommended stack: single EC2 instance (t4g.medium is a good starter instance type) with Dokku, optionally Postgres on RDS, optionally SES for emails, and nothing else.

• Google Cloud Platform

  • Recommended stack: single Compute Engine instance (c4a-highcpu-2 is a good starter instance type) with Dokku, optionally Postgres on Cloud SQL, and nothing else.

• Stripe

  • Recommended stack: just Stripe itself. Don’t bother with MoRs or extras.

If you’re scared of these types of companies because you’ve heard of people getting ripped off due to hard-to-understand bills, that’s what the credits provide (a lot of) buffer for.

You won’t pay a dime if you’re careful - which is easy to do if you stick to the services I recommended.

And again, no vendor lockin which you should avoid if you can help it - you’re using a simple VPS + an open source database that can be run anywhere.

Note, if you have time to spare once you’re up and running, I recommend setting up Terraform which makes it dead simple to move between clouds and provides other benefits.

But let’s get to the credits already.

The first batch of $5K in cloud credits

1️⃣ First, sign up for a free AWS trial account - just pick the normal free tier which gets you 12 months of free EC2 hosting among other benefits. Use this while waiting for your credits to be approved.

2️⃣ Now, it’s time to get yourself the first batch of $5K in AWS credits. Sign up with a free business bank account from Mercury (affiliate link - gets you expedited processing vs. signing up normally so I’d suggest using it) which you can even do as a non-resident of the US. You don’t need to maintain a balance at Mercury, you just need to have an account as I do. Once you’ve signed up for Mercury, visit their AWS perks page and follow the instructions to apply for credits. NOTE: While you can get an account with Mercury as a non-resident, you need to have a US business to get the AWS credits, as the application will ask for your EIN (employer identification number) associated with your US LLC. Be careful if your business is located somewhere else.

Note that this process will take a couple weeks (just because AWS support can be a bit slow) and you may need to provide some documentation to AWS if they reach out.

3️⃣ Congrats, you should have $5K in cloud credits! Here’s what it looks like after you get approved:

At this point, you can also route your AI spend through AWS Bedrock which is applicable for those credits — but I’m less confident in your ability to make $5K last 2 years if you have AI spend involved as that can be quite unpredictable depending on your traffic. Bedrock is not the cheapest provider and has some of the worst latency, so it won’t be super ideal for your users.

Instead, I’d recommend skipping down to the section below where I cover GCP credits as you can use those for Gemini API spend, or enabling data sharing in your OpenAI console for up to ~1M tokens per day for free, or enabling data sharing in your Grok API console for $150/month in free credits.

How about those $5K in payment processing credits?

Let’s take care of the payment processing credits at this stage as they don’t expire, they’re merely capped on a certain amount of revenue.

1️⃣ This requires a different free bank account from Novo (affiliate link - this one gives us both $40 if you make a deposit), and I think you have to be a US resident or citizen to apply, but if you get accepted they have a cool benefit where they have some integration with Stripe that allows for fast transfers. I use and recommend them as my primary business bank.

2️⃣ Once you have a Novo account, click on the Stripe Perk and follow the instructions. Note: you will have to apply the credits to a single Stripe Account, they cannot be shared across all of your Stripe accounts.

3️⃣ Pause this guide for 2 years, you’re all set to build your startup for now! ⏳

Two years are up, what next?

Ok, so two years have passed and your 5K in AWS credits are about to expire, so it’s time to re-up for another two years. Here we have a fork in the road:

1️⃣ AI founders (or if you have GPU/nVIDIA technology usage as a part of your startup): the no-brainer option is to apply for nVIDIA Inception. It’s totally free, you don’t need funding. 👨 Non-AI/GPU founders: skip to step 2 now because you don’t qualify for this.

There are a few unique requirements with nVIDIA’s program:

1. You need a “pitch deck.” Just have ChatGPT generate a PDF for you based on your landing page — if it’s a good landing page most of the info you’d put in a pitch deck should be in there anyway except for revenue.

2. You need to apply with a business email, i.e. [email protected].

3. You need to supply multiple email addresses in the application and assign a job title to each email. If you’ve hired someone recently, great - use their email. If not, they never asked me for verification on this second employee, so you could probably (not confirmed and not recommended) just put in any other email address on your domain as long as it’s a valid email.

Once you’ve applied, it’s a very similar process to getting the first batch of AWS credits - find the perks menu, click the $5K in AWS credits button, follow the instructions, wait for a couple weeks and…

Congrats, you have another $5K to last you another couple years. Pause this guide again and come back in another two years (minus a month or two of buffer).

2️⃣ Ok, yet another two years are just about up. Now apply to Google Cloud’s startup program. This gets you up to $2,000 in credits for another 2 years. Same process as AWS - apply, put in your website and what you’re building, and wait for a couple weeks.

At this point, I could keep going with different credit offers but this is about as far as I’d recommend you go on cloud credits.

Azure has a credit program too - but their product is so horrible that I wouldn’t recommend anyone use it, credits or not. I have production experience with Azure (several years worth due to a prior job) and I would seriously not recommend it to my worst enemy.

So, after you’re done with these AWS and GCP credits, just move to a low cost yet reliable VPS provider like Hetzner as your long term home and save yourself some money.

Speaking of money, you should be making money at this point so you can afford Hetzner’s $5/month VPS pricing, and if you listened to me and set up Terraform + Dokku and kept your cloud services to a minimum, the migration will be very minimal effort 🙂 

Conclusion

That’s it! Hope you were able to get some credits out of these giant cloud companies.

I put a lot of research into this, so if I saved you some money, here’s that link to ☕️ buy me a coffee and show your support!

Thanks so much for reading either way.