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Title should maybe be switched to "Google Cloud vs AWS Onboarding Comparison for YC companies". Not to say that isn't a useful article on its own, but it's har

Title should maybe be switched to "Google Cloud vs AWS Onboarding Comparison for YC companies". Not to say that isn't a useful article on its own, but it's hard to draw too many meaningful conclusions for the rest of us when the first line of the AWS bullet points is "reach out to dedicated YC email".

tapoxi 6y ago
This is also pretty specific about needing more free credits than GCP provides out of the box. If you just want to get started with GCP, you just sign in with your Google Account for $300 in credit. When you run out you can just start paying with a credit card.
- jjoonathan 6y ago
  Exactly. Google: gives me $300 of credit no questions asked and tells me what things will cost upfront. AWS: makes me apply to a program to get credits and if I want to price out anything it's almost a full-blown research effort where I have to dig through documents and cross reference tables between different services and I still probably miss something important. Free tier is opaque enough to frustrate even "use it at small scale and see," because you still have to do the research to see if they are pulling a "your first hit is free but try to scale and WHAM." Oh, but they're customer obsessed, so after much begging and pleading they'll refund half of WHAM, one time.
  - coder543 6y ago
    I don't really agree with that comment. I think all of the megaclouds have undesirably complex pricing structures, but they also all provide pricing calculators. AWS has one here: https://calculator.aws/ https://calculator.aws/ If I punch in the services I want to use, I can quickly see how much they will cost, and it's easy. I recommend clicking "Advanced" inside services on the calculator if you want to be sure you're not going to run into an edge case that costs lots of money unexpectedly. If you use any of the megaclouds without first understanding the price structure, good luck. Personally, I think a lot of companies would be better off using DigitalOcean or some other medium-size cloud. The pricing is much simpler, and pretty much all medium-size clouds charge $0.02/GB for egress bandwidth, either globally or in the US, depending on the provider. In contrast, the megaclouds make shocking amounts of money off of their extremely pricey egress bandwidth, among other highly profitable aspects of their business. Even still, AWS is a solid cloud platform, and they really do seem customer obsessed compared to what I've seen happen on GCP.
    - jjoonathan 6y ago
      I don't really agree with this comment, because we've gone through year after year of new AWS cost analysis and pricing tools that always seem to miss the mark in a major way that's only obvious in hindsight and always seem to be consistently worse than GCP and Azure. They never seem to fix the flaws in old tools, they just tack on new tools with new blindspots. Hence my comment about cross-referencing. If you're willing to put in a lot of effort across tools, you can get a complete picture, but it really does take a lot of effort and foresight into the exact structure that your solution is going to take (which involves cross-referencing documentation). Amazon doesn't make any effort to quote you a price once they have enough information, they always make you work for it. If a price transparency tool is gated behind enough effort, is it really a price transparency tool? That said, I'll grant you that AWS is not the only megacloud leveraging opaque cost structures. They just leverage them more. AWS support is genuinely a cut above, though.
      - coder543 6y ago
        > pricing tools that always seem to miss the mark in a major way that's only obvious in hindsight and seems to be consistently worse than other clouds. Can you provide an example of a service that the AWS calculator doesn't compute the correct price for? I honestly can't remember ever being surprised by what things on AWS cost, and I don't think I'm that shockingly good at detecting hidden costs.
        jjoonathan 6y ago
        Cloudwatch costs have been the ones my coworkers complain about. The one that got me was sagemaker -- the console had a bug where if you went to a region without endpoints, it would pop up a tutorial screen and the tutorial screen would "stick," hiding endpoints in other regions. Which led to hanging endpoints, which were covered by free tier for a few days before costs exploded. We had alerts active, but they alerted when we span up the resources, which was expected, and didn't make it obvious that paging through all the regions ensuring there were no running resources (itself painful) and watching daily costs for a few days was insufficient to ensure that we weren't going to have a $700 bill at the end of the month (or maybe $1400 -- I forget if $700 was the half refunded cost). When I shared this anecdote at Re:Invent, the sentiment at the table was "lol that's cute, here's my story with an order of magnitude higher price tag." There were 5 or 6 of us, and my story was the smallest surprise cost except for one other person who was even greener than I was. > Can you provide an example of a service that the AWS calculator doesn't compute the correct price for? Can you tell me how I should have used AWS calculator to prevent my surprise charge? You can't, because AWS calculator assumes you know exactly what you're asking for, and the problem with opaque pricing structures is that you sometimes don't. Other clouds tend to be much more upfront about "this will cost X," "this is costing X," "you're out of free tier," etc.
dpedu 6y ago
Why? Why can't Google offer the same thing?
- randlet 6y ago
  Of course Google could offer the same thing. My proposed title change would be even more recommended in that case. My point is that obviously AWS thinks that on average being in YC is going to result in more revenue for them and therefore they prioritize support for YC companies. As a non-YC company I won't get the same treatment which makes any conclusions from this article less useful.
  - dpedu 6y ago
    I don't think it's surprising at all that an article posted on a Ycombinator.com subdomain about news talks about Ycombinator-related topics.
- recursive 6y ago
  It wouldn't help much if they did, seeing as how that would be specific to YC. As such, it's not representative of the general experience.
  - blackoil 6y ago
    Not a general experience but common for many incubators, even for some with bootstrapped companies.
tyingq 6y ago
Yeah, that was weird to me also. It just sounds like YC companies collectively use enough AWS to get some premium tier support. I assume GCP has something similar, but YC companies don't spend enough there to get it. Apples and oranges.
- ttul 6y ago
  AWS has, for a few years now, had a team dedicated to ensuring that AWS wins all of the successful startup business, which they know may turn into huge amounts of revenue for the few startups that succeed. The team was headed up originally by Paul Zimmerman (https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulsloanzimmerman/); https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulsloanzimmerman/); he may be a good person to reach out to if you're hoping for some credits.
doomslice 6y ago
I was able to get 130k free GCP credits (over 3 years) just by filling out the startup forms... as a complete nobody. You don't even need an affiliate to sponsor you.
- aroman 6y ago
  Did you apply via https://cloud.google.com/startup https://cloud.google.com/startup? I'm in a similar position and those credits would be lifechanging.
  - doomslice 6y ago
    Yes, exactly. The grants start out small (I think the first one was $3k) -- but then once you spend 75% of them you can apply for the next round, which for me they gave me $17k out of a possible $30k based on previous usage. After I spent around $15k for that over the next year I applied again and got $100k. Just one note though that I already had an MVP that I was running on GCP at the time I applied (but I was within the $300 free credits that I started with so I didn't pay out of pocket).
    - alberth 6y ago
      What does GCP get in return. If they give you free credit, do you have to give then equity in your company, do you guarantee them X spend, etc?
      - faeyanpiraat 6y ago
        If you have enough funds, you might not care about building an efficient architecture, and when the credits run out, you’ll spend more? Also good PR.
      - omarhaneef 6y ago
        If you hit it big, you’ll spend on their platform for a long time. You don’t have to explicitly promise anything because you’ve built everything around their platform for months/years.
syshum 6y ago
Based on other stories though, the customer experiance between the 2 companies appears to be simliar even if not a YC Company. Google has never had a good reputation for Customer service, they believe they can solve all Customer Service with bots and Automation, this will ALWAYS lead to a lower level of customer service. Amazon started in retail sales where customer service is king, so it naturally has batter customer service philosophy than Google. Google has shown zero signs it even desires to have a customer service philosophy that is remotely similar to Amazon, or even Microsoft Software which is somewhere between Amazon and Google on the customer service scale
wdb 6y ago
Yeah, I think having a YC dedicated mail address at AWS helps. As I am still waiting for a response from AWS regarding joining one of their programs while GCP response was within the day. All access sorted the next day.
balls187 6y ago
We got hella (official size) AWS credits by using Carta to manage our captable/409a.
aeturnum 6y ago
I definitely raised my eyebrows at "access to AWS YC slack" It's really nice to hear from high-prestige companies about their experience because it gives outsiders a sense of what prestige might fix. If you're a small startup looking for help using AWS, finding someone to introduce you might really help! Not so much with GCP.
estreeper 6y ago
For what it's worth, as a non-YC company, I found the GCP onboarding process to be far superior in every way, and my experiences were essentially reversed. For context, we started with GCP for Startups 1.5 years ago when we were just getting beyond a demo, and with AWS Activate 1 year ago, when we had almost no revenue and just about 1,000 users. We were based in the Santa Fe Business Incubator (NM, USA). All in all, it had taken our incubator at least 1.5 years to get enrolled in AWS Activate, and 4 days in GCP for Startups. When we applied for GCP for Startups, we were approved in a week, and were contacted right away by an account manager and a support engineer who offered us help with anything we needed. When we applied for Activate, it took a month with lots of followups, and being shuffled between 4 support team members who were communicating with the Activate team (there was no way to contact them directly). It definitely felt like our business was important for GCP, and for AWS, it wasn't. It was an easy choice.

tapoxi 6y ago

This is also pretty specific about needing more free credits than GCP provides out of the box. If you just want to get started with GCP, you just sign in with your Google Account for $300 in credit. When you run out you can just start paying with a credit card.

jjoonathan 6y ago
Exactly. Google: gives me $300 of credit no questions asked and tells me what things will cost upfront. AWS: makes me apply to a program to get credits and if I want to price out anything it's almost a full-blown research effort where I have to dig through documents and cross reference tables between different services and I still probably miss something important. Free tier is opaque enough to frustrate even "use it at small scale and see," because you still have to do the research to see if they are pulling a "your first hit is free but try to scale and WHAM." Oh, but they're customer obsessed, so after much begging and pleading they'll refund half of WHAM, one time.
- coder543 6y ago
  I don't really agree with that comment. I think all of the megaclouds have undesirably complex pricing structures, but they also all provide pricing calculators. AWS has one here: https://calculator.aws/ https://calculator.aws/ If I punch in the services I want to use, I can quickly see how much they will cost, and it's easy. I recommend clicking "Advanced" inside services on the calculator if you want to be sure you're not going to run into an edge case that costs lots of money unexpectedly. If you use any of the megaclouds without first understanding the price structure, good luck. Personally, I think a lot of companies would be better off using DigitalOcean or some other medium-size cloud. The pricing is much simpler, and pretty much all medium-size clouds charge $0.02/GB for egress bandwidth, either globally or in the US, depending on the provider. In contrast, the megaclouds make shocking amounts of money off of their extremely pricey egress bandwidth, among other highly profitable aspects of their business. Even still, AWS is a solid cloud platform, and they really do seem customer obsessed compared to what I've seen happen on GCP.
  - jjoonathan 6y ago
    I don't really agree with this comment, because we've gone through year after year of new AWS cost analysis and pricing tools that always seem to miss the mark in a major way that's only obvious in hindsight and always seem to be consistently worse than GCP and Azure. They never seem to fix the flaws in old tools, they just tack on new tools with new blindspots. Hence my comment about cross-referencing. If you're willing to put in a lot of effort across tools, you can get a complete picture, but it really does take a lot of effort and foresight into the exact structure that your solution is going to take (which involves cross-referencing documentation). Amazon doesn't make any effort to quote you a price once they have enough information, they always make you work for it. If a price transparency tool is gated behind enough effort, is it really a price transparency tool? That said, I'll grant you that AWS is not the only megacloud leveraging opaque cost structures. They just leverage them more. AWS support is genuinely a cut above, though.
    - coder543 6y ago
      > pricing tools that always seem to miss the mark in a major way that's only obvious in hindsight and seems to be consistently worse than other clouds. Can you provide an example of a service that the AWS calculator doesn't compute the correct price for? I honestly can't remember ever being surprised by what things on AWS cost, and I don't think I'm that shockingly good at detecting hidden costs.
      - jjoonathan 6y ago
        Cloudwatch costs have been the ones my coworkers complain about. The one that got me was sagemaker -- the console had a bug where if you went to a region without endpoints, it would pop up a tutorial screen and the tutorial screen would "stick," hiding endpoints in other regions. Which led to hanging endpoints, which were covered by free tier for a few days before costs exploded. We had alerts active, but they alerted when we span up the resources, which was expected, and didn't make it obvious that paging through all the regions ensuring there were no running resources (itself painful) and watching daily costs for a few days was insufficient to ensure that we weren't going to have a $700 bill at the end of the month (or maybe $1400 -- I forget if $700 was the half refunded cost). When I shared this anecdote at Re:Invent, the sentiment at the table was "lol that's cute, here's my story with an order of magnitude higher price tag." There were 5 or 6 of us, and my story was the smallest surprise cost except for one other person who was even greener than I was. > Can you provide an example of a service that the AWS calculator doesn't compute the correct price for? Can you tell me how I should have used AWS calculator to prevent my surprise charge? You can't, because AWS calculator assumes you know exactly what you're asking for, and the problem with opaque pricing structures is that you sometimes don't. Other clouds tend to be much more upfront about "this will cost X," "this is costing X," "you're out of free tier," etc.

dpedu 6y ago

Why? Why can't Google offer the same thing?

randlet 6y ago
Of course Google could offer the same thing. My proposed title change would be even more recommended in that case. My point is that obviously AWS thinks that on average being in YC is going to result in more revenue for them and therefore they prioritize support for YC companies. As a non-YC company I won't get the same treatment which makes any conclusions from this article less useful.
- dpedu 6y ago
  I don't think it's surprising at all that an article posted on a Ycombinator.com subdomain about news talks about Ycombinator-related topics.
recursive 6y ago
It wouldn't help much if they did, seeing as how that would be specific to YC. As such, it's not representative of the general experience.
- blackoil 6y ago
  Not a general experience but common for many incubators, even for some with bootstrapped companies.

tyingq 6y ago

Yeah, that was weird to me also. It just sounds like YC companies collectively use enough AWS to get some premium tier support. I assume GCP has something similar, but YC companies don't spend enough there to get it. Apples and oranges.

ttul 6y ago
AWS has, for a few years now, had a team dedicated to ensuring that AWS wins all of the successful startup business, which they know may turn into huge amounts of revenue for the few startups that succeed. The team was headed up originally by Paul Zimmerman (https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulsloanzimmerman/); https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulsloanzimmerman/); he may be a good person to reach out to if you're hoping for some credits.

doomslice 6y ago

I was able to get 130k free GCP credits (over 3 years) just by filling out the startup forms... as a complete nobody. You don't even need an affiliate to sponsor you.

aroman 6y ago
Did you apply via https://cloud.google.com/startup https://cloud.google.com/startup? I'm in a similar position and those credits would be lifechanging.
- doomslice 6y ago
  Yes, exactly. The grants start out small (I think the first one was $3k) -- but then once you spend 75% of them you can apply for the next round, which for me they gave me $17k out of a possible $30k based on previous usage. After I spent around $15k for that over the next year I applied again and got $100k. Just one note though that I already had an MVP that I was running on GCP at the time I applied (but I was within the $300 free credits that I started with so I didn't pay out of pocket).
  - alberth 6y ago
    What does GCP get in return. If they give you free credit, do you have to give then equity in your company, do you guarantee them X spend, etc?
    - faeyanpiraat 6y ago
      If you have enough funds, you might not care about building an efficient architecture, and when the credits run out, you’ll spend more? Also good PR.
    - omarhaneef 6y ago
      If you hit it big, you’ll spend on their platform for a long time. You don’t have to explicitly promise anything because you’ve built everything around their platform for months/years.

syshum 6y ago

Based on other stories though, the customer experiance between the 2 companies appears to be simliar even if not a YC Company. Google has never had a good reputation for Customer service, they believe they can solve all Customer Service with bots and Automation, this will ALWAYS lead to a lower level of customer service. Amazon started in retail sales where customer service is king, so it naturally has batter customer service philosophy than Google. Google has shown zero signs it even desires to have a customer service philosophy that is remotely similar to Amazon, or even Microsoft Software which is somewhere between Amazon and Google on the customer service scale

wdb 6y ago

Yeah, I think having a YC dedicated mail address at AWS helps. As I am still waiting for a response from AWS regarding joining one of their programs while GCP response was within the day. All access sorted the next day.

balls187 6y ago

We got hella (official size) AWS credits by using Carta to manage our captable/409a.

aeturnum 6y ago

I definitely raised my eyebrows at "access to AWS YC slack" It's really nice to hear from high-prestige companies about their experience because it gives outsiders a sense of what prestige might fix. If you're a small startup looking for help using AWS, finding someone to introduce you might really help! Not so much with GCP.

estreeper 6y ago

For what it's worth, as a non-YC company, I found the GCP onboarding process to be far superior in every way, and my experiences were essentially reversed. For context, we started with GCP for Startups 1.5 years ago when we were just getting beyond a demo, and with AWS Activate 1 year ago, when we had almost no revenue and just about 1,000 users. We were based in the Santa Fe Business Incubator (NM, USA). All in all, it had taken our incubator at least 1.5 years to get enrolled in AWS Activate, and 4 days in GCP for Startups. When we applied for GCP for Startups, we were approved in a week, and were contacted right away by an account manager and a support engineer who offered us help with anything we needed. When we applied for Activate, it took a month with lots of followups, and being shuffled between 4 support team members who were communicating with the Activate team (there was no way to contact them directly). It definitely felt like our business was important for GCP, and for AWS, it wasn't. It was an easy choice.