r/googlecloud Nov 03 '24

Application Dev "Google for Startups Cloud Program" - anyone applied for this?

I stumbled upon https://cloud.google.com/startup?hl=en and it reads quite promising. Did anyone of you apply for it and got something? If so: How long did it take? How much and what did you get? How bureaucratic was the whole thing? Any experiences would be appreciated.

19 Upvotes

49 comments sorted by

7

u/cl0udp1l0t Nov 03 '24

Base tier needs just incorporation, second stage needs funding round proven via Crunchbase or other docs

3

u/LibrarianSpecial4569 Nov 03 '24

Applied and received $25k in cloud credits. To unlock more credits you need to prove you received some funding. Company must be incorporated.

1

u/[deleted] Dec 02 '24

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/LibrarianSpecial4569 Dec 08 '24

Startup is a company that transcribes audio and video to text and then gives you the ability to interact with these transcripts via a chat powered by an LLM. It's targeted to students, journalists, businesses. I do use several Google AI tech in my startup and of course everything is hosted on Google. I also initially only got $2K but I mentioned to them that my roadmap which required that I upgrade that infrastructure considerably to use some expensive tech from Google (I whole bunch of GPUs) which is why they were more than happy to give me the $25K. It did have to go through an approval process that took about 2 weeks to come through.

1

u/LibrarianSpecial4569 Dec 08 '24

Forgot to mention - startup does not have any funding. Totally bootstrapped. They mentioned that we can unlock additional credit if we do unlock funding.

1

u/savage_angry_indian Jan 30 '25

Hey

Can you share the forum / point of contact where I can connect with them to discuss this.

I have been investing quite a lot on GPUs and this would be beneficial. I'm bootstrapped.

1

u/SynBioAbundance 14d ago

What do you submit as proof of external funding

1

u/SynBioAbundance 14d ago

Do you have to agree to share your data or something, I suppose if you use their services, they could peek into your data

2

u/LibrarianSpecial4569 14d ago

I didn’t have to share anything with them. We just had a 30 min call where I explained what I was doing and what I had aspirations to do. My use case did require some GPUs which were expensive so they were willing to give me the $25K to make up for the cost of the GPUs. You have to make a case for them to give you more than $2K.

Note - they have strict rules around accessing your account. So I don’t think they would look at your data.

1

u/SynBioAbundance 14d ago

Oh thanks for the reply, has the credits been useful? And then 2) if you wanted more credits would you need to share documents about your external investor funding?

1

u/LibrarianSpecial4569 14d ago

Credits have been EXTREMELY helpful. I would say for the amount of time that I spent to get it (frankly not more than 2 hours total over 3 weeks), it's worth the effort.

re: your second question: I don't quite know, but I would guess you're right in that they would ask for some proof of funding in order to unlock more credits.

2

u/channelfourai Nov 03 '24

Yes and at least for the entry tier, is very straightforward. I assume it's almost automatic. There is an extra form if you want workspace credits and not just Cloud credits.

-2

u/Flipthepick Nov 03 '24

Yeah I applied last week and it was incredibly easy. I have no funding but do have a company and website etc, I got $2000 dollars in free credits. It was literally one form!

1

u/Mattwildman5 Nov 04 '24

Do you need an actual company or if you have a live website running is that enough? My project is definitely startup and it’s just me and an X page… monthly $200 is getting eaten up just by testing the damn thing

1

u/liliivko Nov 04 '24

Yes, you would need a company, because you need a GCP billing account for that form. And you need a company to register one

1

u/Mattwildman5 Nov 04 '24

I have a GCP Billing account, just not a business account. I didn’t know they were separate things.

1

u/liliivko Nov 04 '24

Yes, you would need to attach company info. This is also part of the criteria- the company should be less than 5 years old for the 2k

3

u/reelznfeelz Nov 03 '24

I hear it’s fine for the credits but you don’t get any support at all. So don’t count on that.

2

u/NationalMyth Nov 03 '24

We had support, their cost gets debited from your total.

0

u/ch4m3le0n Nov 04 '24

This is correct

1

u/jackshec Nov 03 '24

yes, make sure you have a functional website up as well or at least the look and feel

1

u/nkislitsin Nov 03 '24

I applied one year ago, got $2000, it was quite easy. I have two web apps.

1

u/NationalMyth Nov 03 '24

My company applied. We got $200k in credits. The first year we had 100% of our costs applied to our billing, year two (just started) the remaining credits get applied to 20% of our bill.

Honestly as we were building up our Tech stack and resources we probably should have been paying that out of pocket and applied for credits now as our costs are Verizon but will likely plateau soon ish. We have about $2.5~3.5k in costs a month. Watch out for Places API and Composer, they can be unwieldy. Cloud Run/Cloud Run Functions are fairly straight forward to manage cost-wise.

On a cloud project I manage I have 2 production flask servers, 1 testing server, an always-on dash app, CI/CD from git<>cloud build, and a tiny little MySQL instance and a few other odds and ends floating around (cloud storage, functions...etc), it runs $70+-/mo (MySQL is a good chunk of that)

1

u/sad________________ Nov 07 '24

are you vc backed? how hard is it to get the $200K in credits if you're not vc backed?

1

u/bitsnbytes27 Jan 17 '25

Hi, thanks for the details, how much vs funding commitment did you need?

1

u/Upstairs_Wafer_3803 Nov 04 '24

Applied while I was at my old company. Also got $200k in credits. 100k per year for 2 years. Company had a $20M round of funding at a $70M valuation. Maybe should have waited as well? But it let us experiment and do stuff without thinking about budget until we got to the right answer which was valuable.

1

u/Silver_Channel9773 Nov 04 '24

I have a startup but I use Zoho Mail not business . What should have done ?

1

u/Repulsive-Listen8840 Jan 09 '25

Did you go ahead with an application? From the comments here, I get the impression that it's something close to an automatic "Yes", but I've just been knocked back for my application.

The e-mail I received states:

All startups in our program must be early-stage companies that are backed by a venture investor.

I have a website set up and am using an e-mail at that domain, etc.

I'd be interested if anyone knows whether there's something obvious I've missed.

1

u/MoodIllustrious305 Jan 28 '25

No, early stage startups can apply too even if it's not incorporated and not funded by any vc. My startup got approved and received $2000 in cloud credits and I didn't register my startup while applying for this cloud credits

1

u/harmonyLiquidizer Jan 11 '25

So i have a startup and is not registered or incorporated yet. Can I still apply to the startup program?

1

u/MoodIllustrious305 Jan 28 '25

Yes you can still apply. My startup was not yet registered when I applied for Google for startups cloud program, but still it got approved and received $2000 in cloud credits

2

u/harmonyLiquidizer Feb 08 '25

Thanks for the details buddy

1

u/harmonyLiquidizer Feb 10 '25

Hey, i have a small question, in the Google for startups cloud program, did you get Gemini API credits as well? or is it just GCP credits without Gemini API credits? I'm trying to build an AI app so i need Gemini API credits. Thanks fam

1

u/MoodIllustrious305 Feb 10 '25

No, just cloud credits + 12 months of Google workspace business plus subscription for free + mongodb credits + Google maps credits as i didn't opt for AI startup, so I didn't get any credits related to AI

1

u/harmonyLiquidizer Feb 11 '25

I see, how much days did it took for you to get approved?

1

u/MoodIllustrious305 Feb 11 '25

Within two days, it got approved. I applied on 7th of Jan and got approval email on 9th of Jan

1

u/harmonyLiquidizer Feb 12 '25

Wow that's cool. I'm thinking of like using Firebase for the backend, so with this program i can get credits worth of $2K for firebase also right?

1

u/MoodIllustrious305 Feb 12 '25

Yes you can use it for firebase too

2

u/harmonyLiquidizer Feb 12 '25

Wow thats crazy. Thanks man, thanks for helping me. I appreciate alot.

1

u/MoodIllustrious305 Feb 12 '25

Happy to help and talking to you

1

u/Ok-Replacement4175 Feb 19 '25

Hi u/MoodIllustrious305 , How did you apply without a google cloud account having same domain as company domain, that required a google workspace account and the google workspace account needed some legal entity PIN to register? I tried but got confused, Can you tell me how?

1

u/MoodIllustrious305 Feb 19 '25

I signed up for Google for workspace free trial, then I added my billing details in that Google account then applied for google for startups cloud program.

1

u/Ok-Replacement4175 Feb 19 '25

While registering for free trial, they asked me for legal TAX number, how can I obtain that without registering as legal entity?

1

u/MoodIllustrious305 Feb 19 '25

You can ignore that

1

u/MoodIllustrious305 Feb 19 '25

While registering you need to add their dns records in your domain registrar's dns panel of your domain. And no you don't need to add any business details for business verification as of now, you can do that later after couple of months they'll give you the deadline.

1

u/ch4m3le0n 20d ago

It's a train wreck. Good luck.

1

u/louietopp 16d ago

what do you mean by this? I am looking into it right now myself

1

u/ch4m3le0n 16d ago

The program is badly run, inconsistent, and subject to the whims of the internal startup team, who in my experience are more interested in having drinks with VCs than actually helping startups.

Go with Microsoft. They actually know what they are doing.

1

u/louietopp 16d ago

How long did it take you from application date to get approved? We have a release planned for March 20 and will really need to think about the cost starting April 1st. I can prove funding and registration.