Comparison
AWS vs Google Cloud vs Microsoft startup credits
Google for Startups Cloud offers the largest headline amount, Microsoft Founders Hub is the easiest to get without a referral, and AWS Activate sits in between with the widest partner network. Most startups should apply to all three: they are not mutually exclusive.
These three programs cover the overwhelming majority of cloud spend for early-stage startups, and the comparison people usually publish stops at the headline number. The headline number is the least useful part, because the largest tier of each is gated behind a referral you may not have.
The table below is generated from our catalog, so the amounts are the ones we last verified against each provider rather than the ones a blog post copied in 2024.
What we would actually do
Apply to all three
Nothing in the terms of any of them stops you holding credits from the others, and the application is 20 minutes each. Treating this as a choice is the most common mistake founders make here.
The referral matters more than the provider
Across all three, the gap between the self-serve tier and the partner tier is far larger than the gap between the providers. If you are in or near an accelerator, that route is worth more than picking the "best" program.
Pick your primary on architecture, not credits
Credits run out. Migrating a production system does not get cheaper later. Choose the cloud you actually want to run on, then take the others as a bonus for side workloads and experiments.
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