Stripe Atlas Includes $5,000 in AWS Credits. This is What We Actually Got.

If you'd like more Stripe Atlas, check out our guide for founders.

A few months ago we wrote about "Our Experience with Stripe Atlas" and what it was like to use them to start a small internet business (tldr; generally good).

One of the perks of Stripe Atlas is that they offer a heap of credits for multiple cloud platforms. From the Stripe site:

"Stripe Atlas founders can access free credits, exclusive access to free products, and discounted pricing from our partners, including $5,000 in credits from Amazon Web Services and $10,000 in credits from DigitalOcean."

There's always an understanding with services like this that credit offers come with a lot of hand-waving and "caveat emptor"-ing: notice founders "have access to" free credits (emphasis ours), which could imply that some founders have the capacity to call on those funds, but not all. But still, the language does seem very direct and makes it easy to believe signing up includes $5,000 in AWS credits.

We have not received $5,000 in AWS credits. But now the good news: We have still received $1,000 in AWS credits.

$1,000 is still very generous, and a great gift from Stripe. No business filing with Stripe Atlas should ever depend on $1,000 of AWS credits as some kind of life-or-death runway, and for everyone receiving it it's more a small bonus than some kind of critical seed money.

But I do think it's useful to note, if you're an entrepreneur considering Stripe Atlas, what general figures you can expect. We're not a high capital-intensive operation of course, so if you're in a similar micro-saas space, then you also probably won't get the full 5k.

We're not sure what path you should take to get that possible $5,000 in AWS credits. There's not much communication about what criteria Stripe uses to arrive at the number they finalize on.

But you heard it from us: Take that 5,000 number with a grain of salt. It's a great gift - just maybe not as great as you think.