Yes, exactly.

The grants start out small (I think the first one was $3k) -- but then once you spend 75% of them you can apply for the next round, which for me they gave me $17k out of a possible $30k based on previous usage. After I spent around $15k for that over the next year I applied again and got $100k.

Just one note though that I already had an MVP that I was running on GCP at the time I applied (but I was within the $300 free credits that I started with so I didn't pay out of pocket).

What does GCP get in return. If they give you free credit, do you have to give then equity in your company, do you guarantee them X spend, etc?

If you hit it big, you’ll spend on their platform for a long time. You don’t have to explicitly promise anything because you’ve built everything around their platform for months/years.

Moving clouds is hard if you use the cloud features. Giving credits to startups is a cheap way to get them locked in for the future.

If you have enough funds, you might not care about building an efficient architecture, and when the credits run out, you’ll spend more?

Also good PR.

Your future spend. Once you start using them, it would be a decent amount of work to change.

probably vendor lock in

my understanding is that GCP has recently changed their startup programme. I applied a few weeks ago, and had the same bad service as the OP.

Oh you'll pay in the end.

Care to elaborate?

vendor lock-in. Good luck switching away from GCP once you're tied in to their cloud services. Might as well spend the VC money and not worry about moving.

How does spending VC money help with this? You will still inevitably end up getting locked into whatever company you use