There exist many, many incubators out there which are essentially on the YC model. Let's charitably describe them as occupying a good bit of a hypothetical spe

There exist many, many incubators out there which are essentially on the YC model. Let's charitably describe them as occupying a good bit of a hypothetical spectrum of value one could provide. A new incubator which provided no funding is signaling to prospective companies that it is not as valuable as other incubators. It is less about the $10k (which is a virtually meaningless amount of money anyhow in business) and more about "We couldn't actually convince anyone to part with $10k per startup but don't worry despite that we do know what we're talking about". This would likely doom that hypothetical incubator to only getting applications from people who are probably not ready to make successful companies, who are legion. You know, "great idea for a social network around filtered mobile pictures of razor blades just needs a tech cofounder to get their gamification on". That would be the happy end of the inbox for that hypothetical incubator.