Developers who think in terms of over-optimizing costs probably wouldn't even be picked anyway.
Really? Are you able to produce more than $5000 of value for your startup in 20 minutes?
Office hours provides way more insightful and long term value than some free server hours.
For the people YC wants to talk to, sure. But dangling $5000 of AWS credits in front of people may attract people they don't want to talk to.
Hosting credits are not currency. Most startups will never need anything close to $5000 in AWS credits.
Not to mention that AWS basically gives them out like candy. I have several grand in AWS credit just from attending hackathons and conferences.
This statement is not true. It is quite easy to have a $5,000 a month bill on Amazon.
The majority of startups never get any real traction and see only a small trickle of traffic every day.
Unfortunately I cannot disclose the numbers and the companies, but they are way larger than $5k
$5k in credit for hosting probably has a marginal cost of $0.
On the other end, if you take AWS offer and start using their services, you'll probably won't leave them anytime soon, particularly if you rely on provider-specific systems (SNS for instance).
Startups get a nice discount, hosting providers get an opportunity to supply a future successful startup and very quickly win back the $5k...
(BTW, Tarsnap isn't in any incubators/accelerators, but if someone wants to throw a bunch of AWS credits at me I'd be happy to have them!)
The relative value of 20 minutes with YC partners is significantly higher, so as to make the incentive of the $5000 irrelevant. Anyone who thinks otherwise is missing the real value proposition of the office hours program.
As to OP's concern that it could create incentive for someone to waste the YC partner's time in the sole interest of gaining the $5000 of credits, I think that is not giving enough credit to the YC folks. I'm sure they'll be able to weed them out.
I'm much more focused on getting and having enough users that I get to worry about spending 5k on hosting.
But at the same time I can't think of anything I could spend 20 minutes on which would create more than $5k of value. $1 of AWS credits = $1 less expenses = $1 more profits = $1 more revenue.
If I'm a very early stage startup, I'm worried about being alive next year. Yes, 5K may help, but that 5K will likely not make a significant difference in my company's prospects. 20 minutes with an advisor at YC could completely change my company's trajectory.
I'd imagine there are very few companies that apply, and then get selected for office hours, that will walk away from the meeting saying "I'm so glad I did that because I got 5K in Amazon credits." That said, it is still a great perk.
This seems really dangerous -- it creates a huge incentive for companies to waste YC's time. There aren't many things early startup founders can do which are worth more than $15000/hour. Sure, you can probably filter out many AWS-credit-seekers via the application process, but that adds more work for the people who read through all the applications.
Have you considered either (a) refusing the credits, or (b) taking a small number and handing them out to the most "deserving" startups at the end of the day?