So it's just the free usage tier with a forum tacked on, or if already have funding you get free credits.

And some support.. but yeah, it seems so.

The startups who'll get the most benefit here are the ones already getting the most help from accelerators or funds. Just a clever and low risk marketing experiment from AWS, IMHO.

+ some technical training through labs and web-based mechanisms

+ access to new startup forum at AWS

Training on using their platform for their commercial benefit. That should be the default anyway.

Maybe this was pre-seeded by my thoughts of Amazon trying to get startups drug-dependant on their stack but did anyone else see the penis at the beginning of the video?

> Amazon trying to get startups drug-dependant on their stack

That's a silly (and predictable) criticism. Of course this is Amazon getting their product into the hands of potential large, future customer. Business Development 101.

What isn't clear is why that should be considered a bad thing? Startups have little money and little time. If this allows them to get a product out faster and for less money than otherwise, why not? Every little helps. As others have pointed out, they're not locking you in any more than any other external provider would.

I didn't, now I cannot unsee it, damn it.

This looks like Amazon's answer to BizSpark[0] which includes three years of free software, etc. including $60K worth of Azure services for two years[1].

[0] http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/

[1] http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/plus/default.aspx

SoftLayer has been doing something like this for a while now, $1k/month of free hosting:

http://www.softlayer.com/partners/catalyst

I suppose this is in response to Google pushing it's developer platform. Are they going to match Google's free tier and tendency to drop credits on developers at the drop of a hat?

The AWS free tier is pretty generous, and I was randomly gifted a $100 credit a few months back because I accidentally bought a reserved instance in EC2-Classic rather than EC2-VPC and had to file a ticket on it.

My experience is that the free tier is pretty useless any way. If you want to just test something, then one micro instance is fine. But if you actually want to run a basic web app? One micro instance does not work.

The weird thing is that all the other services have decent, useful free tiers that give you enough resources for your beta phase at least. Why is EC2 so low? Maybe make it 750 hours total for any set of instances?

Depends on what you mean by "basic web app". For example, the Erlang-based CMS Zotonic runs beautifully on a T1.micro, even with PostgreSQL and an Nginx proxy on the same box.

You can certainly run a basic app on a micro instance, unless it has to run in a JVM, maybe.

Not at reasonable performance or in high availability mode. Like I said it is fine for testing and that is about it.

The self-starter package is pretty much useless as it is the same as what they have already. The portfolio package seems excellent. I understand they want the cream of the crop, but I wish there was an option to submit your startup for a case-by-case review. We are burning about $1k/mo on AWS and it would be great if we could get some of this funding. It would go a real long way.

Seems like a case for an "accelerator" that only exists insofar as it vouches for otherwise-self-sufficient startups and has access to the portfolio package. Kind of like how CDBaby works/worked as a label on iTMS. (Or kind of like libraries getting subscriptions to scientific journals for the benefits of their patrons.)

They are like Heroin Dealers, first injection is free ;) just try it.

It's not like you can't port it over to your own infrastructure if AWS starts getting too costly.

Porting to your infrastructure is not a simple task if you're using AWS services beyond EC2 (DynamoDB, SQS, etc.).

And I don't mean this as a criticism of AWS. We're happy users and have no plans to move off. Just don't underestimate the cost of moving.

It is expensive, but it's also possible.

What I can't understand is if the plan is free for one year only like the free tier or if there is another limit.

Anyone knows?

I read it as it would last beyond one year, unlike the normal free tier, but I’d like some clarification as well.

Edit: Re-reading it (particularly the “AWS Promotional Credit” section at the bottom) leads me to believe that the free tier is exactly the same as the regular free tier and it expires 12 months from sign-up.

The DNS service (Route 53 - https://aws.amazon.com/route53/) seems to be missing from the free tier ... other than that, it looks like everything you need.

Remember that these core services are free for only 12 months. After that, it's pay as you go at the usual rates. On the plus side, some of the other services -- DynamoDB, Simple Workflow, Simple Queue Service, Simple Notification Service, Amazon Elastic Transcoder, and CloudWatch -- are still eligible for the free tier after the first year.

The $0.50/month Route53 is going to cost a startup would probably just look silly as part of the free tier.

The self-starter package looks just like the free trail package.

How is the free tier service if i want to host a single launch page for my startup which will take email IDs in a form and send email via the PEAR library ?

Is anyone down voting me who doesn't work for Amazon? I really don't see how this offer is anything to get excited about. What am I missing?

It's a huge company acknowledging start ups and offering them some free services. The free tier is pretty awesome as it is, and they "only" offered a couple more free services on top of that. I don't know, I'm using AWS and I'm not like shitting-my-pants excited but I think it's cool. I'm definitely not going to be a snob about it even if I wasn't using them though.

/doesn't work for amazon, but also didn't/can't downvote you

Looks like the page is down, isn't?

Not good for the business be off-line in the announcement day, IMHO.

Works fine here and worked before.

Working fine for me.