How we managed to secure $25K in GCP credits without a VC
We didn't know it was possible to get GCP credits without a VC
Cloud costs are one of the biggest contributors to our burn rate. So, how can we reduce it?
Up until recently we didn’t know that you could get cloud credits without a VC, so we decided to write about this for anyone who wasn’t aware of this!
We reached out to a few cloud providers to reduce our cloud costs. We were successful with Cloudflare, they gave us $5000 in credits. This was good, but we needed bare bones Linux VMs and k8s nodes for our runtime and GPU security, and Cloudflare didn’t have one. But we do use Cloudflare for things like Tunnels and DDoS protection.
We got angel funding from Balaji and used Brex as our banking partner. We dug into Brex Perks (https://www.brex.com/support/brex-partner-perks) and realized they offered “Google Cloud: You can have Google Cloud and Firebase costs covered up to $200,000 USD over 2 years.”
The Brex “AWS Activate” was only $5,000. We knew that wouldn’t be enough for what we are building. So we didn’t bother with AWS Activate.
We were already talking to GCP before this, and we shared that we were banking with Brex and wanted to use this option for cloud credits. The GCP team said we’d need funding to get credits. It doesn’t have to be VC, angel or SAFEs work.
The GCP team reached out to AngelList to confirm that Balaji funded us, and once that was confirmed, we got $25,000 in cloud credits. The perks page says $200k, but GCP gave us $25k. Not sure why the gap, but we’ll take it.
This process took more than 8 weeks, with back and forth emails and verification delays. So if you want to do this be patient.
If you’re a Brex customer with angel funding, here’s exactly what to do:
Fill out the form https://dashboard.brex.com/p/rewards/perks-and-discounts?categories=cloud-computing&drawer=perk%7EGoogle+Cloud
Email [email protected]
The cloud startup support team usually asks for the Angel’s email address to validate the funding.
Look, $25k isn’t life changing, but it’s at least 6 months of runway we didn’t have to pay for. If you’re bootstrapping or angel funded, every dollar counts.
The process is bureaucratic and slow, but definitely worth it.
If you hit any roadblocks, hit me up at [email protected], and I’ll try to help!
We know that this blog post sounds kind of sponsored but we aren’t sponsored by Brex. We are just sharing this because it was useful for us!
The 8-week timline you mentioned is actually pretty realistic for these enterprise programs. I'm curious how the $25k stacks against your actual cloud spend though, especaly for GPU security workloads since those tend to burn through credits faster than standard compute. Did you find Brex's verification proces smoother than dealing with GCP directly?