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I have $10k+ in cloud credits and want to turn them into a real business

I won several hackathons recently and walked away with over $10k in combined AWS, Azure, and GCP credits. I'm between jobs right now and looking to convert these into actual revenue - ideally in a way that could become a sustainable operation, not just a fire sale.

Constraints: Credits are tied to my personal account (no transfers, no org billing) No crypto mining 12-month expiration window

Ideas I'm exploring:

1. Discounted LLM API

2. GPU as a service

4. Build and sell a SaaS product

5. Partner with someone who has a product but no resources I'm also open to teaming up with a founder or team that has a solid idea or early product but is blocked on compute costs.

What I'm trying to figure out:

Has anyone successfully arbitraged cloud credits before? What went wrong?

Which of these paths has the best shot at surviving past the credit expiration?

Open to ideas I haven't thought of.

One idea where the compute is super front loaded would be to use your compute to generate data sets that you could sell. Burn through the $10k build the data sets, then selling them won't cost much in terms of cloud costs.

I also have zero idea on what type of data someone would be interested in buying but you never know.

4 hours agotrcarney

It totally depends if you want to do this as a side gig or a full time thing.. if you want to something on the side.. maybe launch a saas.. for the first two ideas if you have a strong insight that can turn into a fulltime thing then only make sense burning your credits

9 hours agoagcat

Honestly, I feel pretty lost here - never done a saas before, but I'm convinced someone out there has figured out the playbook for turning cloud credits into serious money. The economics just make too much sense for nobody to have cracked it. Right now I'm leaning toward the AWS Marketplace AMI route - package something once, sell it indefinitely, and the credits just fund the development, not the ongoing business. But I'd love to hear from anyone who's actually done this at scale.

5 hours agoPalominocoq

> I'm convinced someone out there has figured out the playbook for turning cloud credits into serious money.

Yeah, the cloud provider figured that out. They shell out credits fairly freely to almost anyone who asks, knowing that one of two things will happen:

1) The recipient won't have a clue what to do with them, and it doesn't cost them much of anything at all to have offered them.

2) The recipient will find a way to turn them into profit, get themselves tied in to their selected vendor, and then become a profit center for the cloud platform.

Don't get me wrong, it is nice to have the credits. But it is a sales tactic - their cost to acquire you as a customer is just their actual underlying costs on whatever resources you spend. Win-win if you can make something of it, but the reason you aren't finding canned playbooks on what to do with them is that if you really knew how to turn them into profits, you never would have needed them in the first place.

So stop trying to minmax your profits, and just go play with the services. Learn everything you can, spend those credits to self-educate, and now you have more experience and skills to offer your next gig, which probably will pay better than starting a side project anywa.