[vmurthy]

At a startup I worked earlier, we tried two things that helped : 1. Reserved instances (you commit for a year and you can save 20% - charged monthly. AFAIK no upfront costs)

2. Like another reader suggested here, there are accelerators/foundations which give away $10k for the 1st year towards cloud usage. We were in healthcare and had a big chip company pay about $10k in credits for a year of AWS. Depending on the domain you are in, there may be a few. If you let me know which domain you work in ( healthcare , media etc.) someone here might be able to point to the right resource