Google for Startups Cloud Program (Start / Scale tiers)
- Free allowance
- Scale and Scale AI tiers: '$200K - $350k in credits' for startups with verifiable Pre-Seed to Series A funding.
- Verdict
- caveatusable, with a named limit or an unprobed read path
- Cost
- free tier
- Identity
- institutionno card, no phone
- Binding limit
- per-object-capper-object-cap: GCS single-object max 5 TiB
- Evidence
- reported3 sources; a third party said so
- Freshness
- stale on 2026-11-05checked 2026-10-21 (inherited); stale on 2026-11-05
| Free tier | Scale and Scale AI tiers: '$200K - $350k in credits' for startups with verifiable Pre-Seed to Series A funding. Credits apply to 'most Google Cloud platform products ... used in a pay-as-you-go (PayG) or consumption billed format' — which includes Cloud Storage buckets. unit mixed; metered on stored-bytes |
|---|---|
| Price | none stated |
| Limits |
per-object-cap: GCS single-object max 5 TiB — not binding. request-rate: per-project GCS quotas (raiseable). retention: credits are time-boxed (program is annual, 'Program qualifications change annually'). Excludes educational institutions, government, nonprofits, personal blogs/content, dev shops and consultancies — a startup wrapper is required. |
| Binding | per-object-cap the per-object cap sets the shard size and therefore the object count; it bounds the total more tightly than any headline quota |
| Identity | institution not published |
| Egress | GCP egress is metered and comes out of the same credit pool; free egress only to Cloudflare-class partners or via the always-free 200 GB/mo Cloud Storage egress allowance. free allowance: 200 GB per month |
| Per-object cap | per-object-cap: GCS single-object max 5 TiB (5497558138880 bytes) |
| Retention | not stated |
| Interface | s3-compatible, rest, rclone s3 |
| Tooling | rclone backend 'gcs' (Tier 1), gsutil, GCS XML/JSON API, GCS interop keys give an S3-compatible endpoint. |
| Composes with | Credits are per billing account and explicitly non-transferable ('Credits may only be used by the original applicant and cannot be shared, split, or resold'). The multiplier is *re-application in later years* — Google allows re-applying if credits went unused ('You may still be eligible for credits if you did not use your credits in a previous enrollment'). $200K at coldline-class rates is petabyte-scale for a year; the binding constraint becomes the 12-month expiry, not bytes. |
| Reliability | Requires a funded company, a matching domain email and a billing account owned by that domain; credits land in a specific billing account ID and cannot be moved afterwards. Year-over-year re-enrolment is not guaranteed. |
| Parsed numbers |
|
Evidence 3
| date | source | what it proved |
|---|---|---|
| 2026-10-21 | cloud.google.com/startup | 'Our Funded program tiers (Scale, and Scale AI) range from $200K - $350k in credits'; exclusion list; 'Credits may only be used by the original applicant' |
| 2026-10-21 | cloud.google.com/startup | 'Can I re-apply if I participated in this program a few years ago but did not use my credits? You may still be eligible ... if you did not use your credits' |
| 2026-10-21 | source not published | probe: GET cloud.google.com/startup -> 200 (numbers quoted live 2026-10-21) |
Unknown values 4
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