[dbish]

Cloud credits are pretty normal right now for startups (see AWS who led the way here with their 100k of credits). It's not "something or nothing", since they're willing to give out credits making the bet that you are hooked on their cloud when/if you grow, and they just need a small percentage of startups they give credits to to work out.

OP (or anyone using cloud servers) aren't "buying" silverware, they're renting it, for a far cheaper (many times free) rate in the early days, with less user overhead, so they don't need to actually buy servers, worry about space, worry about managing them, worry about scaling (or what to do if they have breakout success), etc. and instead focus on the core problem of their startup. This seems like the right tradeoff to me unless you have a very predictable workload (in which case you likely aren't an early stage company), and what most software startups do nowadays, unless you have specific hardware needs that you can't get access to easily or would truly be more expensive to rent and the tradeoff is worth it (ex: GPU rigs for training models or the like).