HN Explorer

14 comments

[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 50.2 ms ] thread
igorzij
Hi HN!

AWS free credits are great - until you run out of them. This can force startups to go out of business, or at least to rebuild with a different cloud provider.

At the same time there are lots of startups who never use all of their AWS credits. Why not share?

CreditHero deploys your stack into the AWS account of another participating startup with low usage. You effectively get extra credits, and they get more usage that allows them to claim more credits.

Major_Grooves
Is there any limitation to this in terms of AWS's T&Cs?
igorzij
They prohibit reselling, but we believe that nothing stops one from hosting a friendly startup's stack or part of it in their account for free. Founders do that a lot. And that's what CreditHero makes super easy
mritchie712
"believe"?

99% chance this against the terms.

igorzij
We studied the T&Cs thoroughly prior to building this. Here: https://aws.amazon.com/awscredits/ The only point of potential concern is #3: "You may not sell, license, rent, or otherwise transfer Promotional Credit. Promotional Credit may be applied only to your own AWS account." In case of using CreditHero there's no sale (host startup are not getting paid) and there's no transfer (it is still their AWS account).
atatatat
This looks really cool!

Good luck!

TechBro8615
Lol this is 100% considered a transfer under this definition. I do admire the confidence of your IANAL interpretation on the landing page though.

Cool project either way. Just don’t expect it to stay up very long.

hur
I'm a little concerned about the possibility of using this to get another company's AWS account banned (e.g. by misusing SES).

Do you think this is a reasonable concern?

igorzij
Yes, a very reasonable concern, we haven't yet implemented any measures against this. However, deployment is done via Terraform centrally in the CreditHero backend, so we can put measures in place.
op00to
Many products offer a managed service that runs in your AWS account. I don’t see how this is any different.
igorzij
Thanks for sharing your thoughts! CreditHero isn't a service that runs in your AWS account. It's a service that allows you to run your stack in someone else's AWS account
webmaven
Won't that expose confidential information (private data, proprietary code, authentication secrets, etc.) to the "friendly startups"?
op00to
I meant to reply to someone asking whether this is in the TOS, to which I think it’s the same as any other offering that uses another AWS account.
orf
Yeah! I’m going to deploy my app, with all my users data, to a random account controlled by someone else I’ve never met and have no relationship with. And the best bit is it will be a nightmare to switch in the future!