What companies offer noteworthy discounts or startup programs for bootstrappers?
So far I found Google for Startups Cloud Program, AWS Activate, Zendesk, Freshdesk, HubSpot, Ganttpro, Notion, and Typeform
We saw it advertised as 90% off on a startup platform we're part of, applied, and we were told since we're a bootstrapped business and haven't raised any money, we can only get 30% off.
It left a sour taste in my mouth.
If you're bootstrapping a business counting every penny of your own money, you're at disadvantage, but if you raised $2 million, we're happy to save some of your VC money!
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It was absolutely ridiculous. I went from being eager to use their product to vowing never to recommend it again. They were just so condescending during the entire process too.
They aren't very interested in taking VC-funded companies money because it will be like taking something out of your right pocket and putting it into the left one - it doesn't do anything to prevent the bubble from popping.
External money (from outside the bubble) however is very important since it's the only thing that will stave off the eventual cascading failure of the industry as all these unsustainable companies (who mostly just pass their VC money back & forth) start falling like dominoes.
It makes a lot of sense to offer a service for free (as a customer acquisition tactic) to a VC funded company because the 2 options are either they go bankrupt or they can be charged 100 times more revenue in 2 years.
On the other hand what is the point of subsidising a bootstrapped business potentially forever?
90% off year 1
50% off year 2
25% off ongoing
HubSpot charges ~$1,200 p/m for their professional Marketing & Sales plans.
I assume 25% off almost $15k annual with pretty much zero CAC is not far off from what HubSpot sales would offer themselves to a multi-year deal.
My experience with bootstrapped companies is that they are just as subject to pressure to grow as startups, and probably have a higher success rate.
Atlassian, Github, Mailchimp and Shopify are all companies that initially started as bootstrapped companies and, in my mind, stand out as some of the most sustainably successful startups of recent history.
Parent's argument is that bootstrapped companies are dramatically less likely to ever grow and that only VC backed early stage companies are, therefore it makes no economic sense to provide discounts to bootstrapped early stage companies.
My point is that I don't believe that this holds out in the data that expected long term value of a bootstrapped company is significantly lower than a VC invested on.
Personally, I find there is ample evidence that "VCs largely are just handing money around to each other to give the illusion of growth" is a solid hypothesis.
"Look at our hockeystick! We got customers equivalent to a million MRR!" "Equivalent? How much are they actually paying?" "...nothing, they're all in our VC batch. But hey, we also get service X for free in return!"
It basically means VC money is a get out of jail free card for a lot of early potential mistakes and miscalculations you can make while working out how much it will cost you to build your business on the back of AWS and how that affects your own pricing model… and the 100x ratio is just rubbing phosphorus into the wound and what elevates this to just insulting to me, it’s one thing to have a 50% or 100% difference in the amount of discount you get (like the already stated example where the VC funds mean you get 90% off, and the bootstrapped customer gets only 30%, that’s a 200% greater discount)
With the 100x on the free AWS credits that’s the equivalent of 10000% discount to the VC funded customer… and when I know that bullshit half baked ideas by people with good networking connections in California are getting a discount like that while I’m working hard to build some sort of legitimate business with my own money… it just feels like Amazon saying “fuck you we don’t want your real business we just want these idiots with their fake business”… it’s not a good vibe to give off.
Later on while using it, they just said emm you got enough out of it, time to charge you 18USD per GB per month, starting today.
It was quite painful to migrate down the line, but you could say we deserved it. We went "gotta catch them all" on all the free shit in the early days.
- Google Firebase Hosting for your static front-ends
- Google Cloud Run Services for your APIs
- Google Cloud Run Jobs for long running compute (more than doubles your Cloud Run monthly free compute grant if you can move some compute workloads into a Job)
- Google Firestore for anything that doesn't benefit from being relational
- Supabase for anything that benefits from being relational and/or you need a vector DB.
(I'd avoid Cloud Functions because the cold starts are abysmal and you'll end up paying a small fee for warm instances for anything that is latency sensitive; proper Cloud Run at least has a CPU boost option that seems to help).
what about the cold start? i've worked on a project that uses cloud run to serve up a django app. has a terrible cold start. it gets a little better if you script a ping but it's still noticeable
Part of that is enabling the CPU Boost since .NET and Java are both JIT runtimes. The CPU Boost seems like -- seat of the pants -- about a 50% reduction in cold start times.
You can give the CPU Boost a try and see if it makes a difference, but it may also be dependent on your framework's startup flow.
I think I read somewhere that Cloud Functions are just Cloud Run under the hood anyways, so just use Cloud Run lol.
But you end up with an abstraction layer (Functions) that adds to the startup cost and less control over the configuration.
There are some benefits like ease of local development and testing since it integrates really nicely into the emulator suite and also integrates handling of authz/authn into the pipeline. But otherwise, I'd recommend Cloud Run for more portability and better control over parameters that affect cost and performance.
You can move it easily to AWS App Runner, Azure Container Apps, or your own K8s cluster.
I build for clients using Cloud Run (faster to deploy during testing), but then ship to AWS App Runner or ECS for customers.
We're bootstrapped, all-in on AWS and have our $25k expiring soon.
Have any other banks recreated that kind of program?
We split out cloud costs using the free tier for google cloud and aws. So all of us kind of pool our resources together so that we keep costs low across accounts.
We're getting some stuff going with AI so we just use everything that's open source on huggingface:
then the key thing is when we reach our for services that you would normally have to pay for we explicitly ask if they have a bootstrapped program. like we tell them we're bootstrapped and as what they can do for us:
We use this for customer outreach for example https://customer.io/startup-program/bootstrapped/
We have a startup program which provides Seed to Series A startups with complimentary access to ourAPIs for the first year (or up to $5,000 USD whichever comes first) as well as mentoring and community support.
Check it out here: https://pangea.cloud/startup
Disclosure: Pangea employee, PM over AuthN & AuthZ
PS: Mention that you discovered us through HN when chatting with our support team, and we'll ease the eligibility criteria for you.
Disclaimer, I work for Mux.
Its associated Github repo shows updates as recently as yesterday
It doesn’t change/expire if you hit it big.
Just email us.
Free plan includes 1000 submissions per month and then we offer discounted pricing plans for startups
It's a great tool for email automation for PLG companies.