Ask HN: Azure startup credits are a bait and switch?

I'm not asking them to give me something for nothing. The whole point is to get me hooked and spending so that when those credits run out or a year is up, I'll have to start paying cash. That's like saying giving someone free heroin is just giving them something for nothing. No, the person giving the heroin absolutely has a reason for doing it, and it's not for nothing.

I'm not asking for them to send me a GPU, just to let me use a GPU instance, you know, like people often do in cloud computing. I'm guessing you've never heard of it. More of a kitchenwares guy?

Cloud credits are pretty normal right now for startups (see AWS who led the way here with their 100k of credits). It's not "something or nothing", since they're willing to give out credits making the bet that you are hooked on their cloud when/if you grow, and they just need a small percentage of startups they give credits to to work out.

OP (or anyone using cloud servers) aren't "buying" silverware, they're renting it, for a far cheaper (many times free) rate in the early days, with less user overhead, so they don't need to actually buy servers, worry about space, worry about managing them, worry about scaling (or what to do if they have breakout success), etc. and instead focus on the core problem of their startup. This seems like the right tradeoff to me unless you have a very predictable workload (in which case you likely aren't an early stage company), and what most software startups do nowadays, unless you have specific hardware needs that you can't get access to easily or would truly be more expensive to rent and the tradeoff is worth it (ex: GPU rigs for training models or the like).

You misunderstand the function of the credits.

The credits are to help you get your infrastructure built with less cost.

This allows you to try things and get things set up the way you want.

Servers shouldn’t be running all the time .. you deploy, test, delete everything, deploy again, etc.

You don’t leave it running unless you want it to eat your credits.

After the initial setup Azure hopes that you have built something that you will want to have continually running, which makes them money long term.

As opposed to just having users look at the price and avoiding Azure altogether.

Seems like a bait and switch when instead of saying "We can give you that SKU in this data center" they say "We can give you that SKU if you use a paid plan".

You must be using some of the higher priced GPUs(which they offered me), but I'm looking for something in the <$1k/month range.

Nope. No, it's not.

Appears so. I was able to start CPU instances.