AWS Credits Expiring or Ran Out? A Guide for Startups

If your startup has participated in AWS Activate, you’ve likely benefited from credits that helped offset your cloud costs. But as those credits run out or expire, managing your AWS bill becomes a priority.

If you’re out of AWS credits and the bill is about to hit, this guide is for you. We’ll cover what to do next to save on AWS, maximize your discounts, and build a cost-effective strategy to extend your runway and scale efficiently.

What are AWS Credits?

First, let’s quickly outline what AWS credits are and how many you can receive. AWS Activate provides startups with promotional credits to offset cloud infrastructure costs, helping them build and scale on AWS. The program includes Activate Founders and Activate Portfolio for self-funded or pre-series B startups.

Screenshot of AWS Credits offers - Activate Founders vs Activate Portfolio

Credits apply to eligible AWS services but exclude certain offerings like AWS Marketplace purchases (except third-party models on Amazon Bedrock), Route 53 domain registrations, AWS Managed Services, and Reserved Instance upfront fees. 

Credits expire after their validity period (typically 1-3 years), and can’t be applied to past bills. For more info, check out the full guide to AWS credits.

What to do if your AWS credits are running out or expiring

We’ll walk you through what you need to know based on your startup’s stage and cloud usage—whether you’re eligible for more credits, need to find more AWS savings, or should rethink your long-term AWS strategy.

Evaluate whether you’re eligible for any other AWS credits

It might be a long shot, but it’s possible you haven’t yet exhausted all of the AWS credits available to you. AWS has recently increased the maximum AWS Activate credit limit to $200,000 for startups that recently raised Series A funding — it might be worth checking if you’re eligible, even if you’ve previously hit the $100,000 cap.

If you’ve truly maxed out your AWS Activate credits, other programs may offer some relief, though they tend to have stricter requirements:

  • AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) – Designed for enterprises or mature startups migrating from on-premises to AWS. MAP includes funding, discounts, and technical support, but it generally isn’t available to cloud-native startups that have been on AWS from day one.
  • Enterprise Discount Program (EDP) – AWS offers volume-based discounts for high-spending customers who commit to long-term AWS usage. If your startup is scaling rapidly and already spending six or seven figures annually, an EDP contract might help lower costs. However, smaller startups may find the commitment requirements too restrictive.

Decide whether to switch or stay with AWS

The key question when evaluating your cloud provider post-credits is whether your usage is flat or growing. If your cloud spend has stabilized or is decreasing, it might be worth exploring alternatives like Azure or GCP to take advantage of the starup cloud credits they offer — assuming the cost savings outweigh the migration effort. 

On the other hand, if your infrastructure is growing, AWS is likely still your best bet. Let’s explore both options and the comparative advantages and disadvantages.

Case 1: Flat or decreasing usage: Switch to Azure or GCP?

Migrating from AWS to Azure or GCP can be quite the hassle, but it might be worth it if you can leverage cloud credits from another provider. Here’s what to consider:

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is known for offering strong startup credits—often up to $200,000 for well-funded startups or even $350,000 for AI-first startups. It’s an attractive option if your stack is heavily AI/ML-based, given GCP’s expertise in TensorFlow, Vertex AI, and TPUs. However:

  • GCP’s general-purpose compute and networking services can sometimes be more expensive than AWS for standard workloads.
  • GCP’s ecosystem is smaller, and hiring engineers with deep GCP experience may be more challenging.

Microsoft Azure credits might be a good fit if your startup is already reliant on Microsoft products like Active Directory, Office 365, or Windows-based workloads. Eligible startups can receive up to $150,000 in funding:

  • Azure is typically more enterprise-focused and doesn’t have the same level of startup community support as AWS or GCP.
  • Some startups find Azure’s documentation and support less intuitive compared to AWS.
  • If your engineers are AWS-native, transitioning to Azure could introduce friction.

The bottom line is that if your usage is stable and you can leverage cloud credits from another provider without major migration headaches, it might be worth exploring. But if AWS is still the best technical fit, shifting purely for short-term credits could backfire in the long run.

Case 2: Rapidly growing usage: Stay with AWS

If your infrastructure is rapidly scaling and AWS is already deeply integrated into your operations, switching just for credits likely doesn’t make sense. In this case often more effective to focus on cost optimization within AWS rather than disrupting your architecture for temporary savings.

Optimize resources for some quick savings

If your credits are just about to run out or expire, the first step is to eliminate any unnecessary AWS costs to minimize the size of your next bill. Some quick first steps include:

  • Turn Off Unused Resources: Start by identifying and shutting down any unused or idle instances. Unused EC2 instances, orphaned EBS volumes, and other idle resources can quickly add up.
  • Rightsize Your Resources: Evaluate your instances and services to ensure you’re not over-provisioning. You can automatically rightsize your EC2 instances with nOps.
  • Move to AWS Graviton Instances: Consider switching to Graviton-powered EC2 instances, which provide better price/performance ratios for certain workloads.
  • Optimize Storage: Review your storage usage, particularly S3 buckets and EBS volumes, to remove unused data and implement cost-effective storage classes (like S3 Glacier for infrequent access data).
  • Schedule dev/test environments: Running services that aren’t actively needed can get costly — consider scheduling resources to stop during weekend or off hours.

Maximize your AWS discounts on existing spend

AWS offers a variety of discount mechanisms, including Reserved Instances (RIs) and Savings Plans (SPs), that can significantly reduce your overall cloud costs. Both provide significant savings compared to On-Demand pricing, but they differ in flexibility and application.

Reserved Instances (RIs) offer discounts for committing to specific EC2 instance types in a given region. There are two types of RIs:

  • Standard RIs: These offer the highest savings (up to 75%) but are rigid in terms of instance type, region, and operating system.
  • Convertible RIs: These offer more flexibility than Standard RIs but only up to 54% savings. You can exchange them for other CRIs with different instance families, operating systems, or tenancies, as long as the value remains the same or greater. This is ideal for changing requirements.

Savings Plans (SPs) are more flexible, applying to a broader range of services (EC2, Lambda, Fargate). You can choose between:

  • Compute Savings Plans: These offer savings (up to 66%) and apply to any EC2 usage regardless of instance type, operating system, region, and tenancy, as well as Fargate and Lambda. 
  • EC2 Instance Savings Plans: These are more specific to EC2 instance families in a region but still offer flexibility in instance size and operating system across the selected region, with savings up to 72%.

Committing to Reserved Instances or Savings Plans can be risky if your usage evolves over time — which is typical for a startup. Overcommitting means you could end up paying for more capacity than you actually need, locking in those costs for one to three years. Additionally, while Convertible RIs offer some flexibility, they often require extensive manual management.

If these challenges sound familiar, you might consider an solution like nOps — it automatically manages your commitments to maximize your discounts and flexibility, with a guarantee of 100% utilization of what we manage for you. You can try it out with your AWS account to see how much you’ll save.

Boost your cost efficiency with scalable practices for the long term

For long-term cost efficiency, startups can move beyond quick fixes and adopt architectural strategies in line with AWS best practices for cost optimization that dynamically adjust compute resources, optimize for variable workloads, and reduce reliance on always-on infrastructure. These include:

  • Auto Scaling with Karpenter – Use Karpenter to dynamically scale Kubernetes workloads based on real-time demand, optimizing for cost and performance while eliminating manual node provisioning.
  • Spot Instances for Stateful and Stateless Workloads – Move both stateless and stateful workloads to Spot Instances with proper fallback strategies, such as managed node groups with mixed instance policies.
  • Ephemeral Compute for Batch Processing – Run CI/CD jobs, data processing, and ML training on short-lived Spot Instances, AWS Batch, or Fargate to avoid paying for idle compute.
  • Architect for Compute Flexibility – Design applications to support diverse instance types, including Graviton, AMD, and Intel, allowing for real-time optimization based on pricing and availability.
  • Leverage Serverless for Cost-Efficient Execution – Offload compute-intensive but intermittent workloads to AWS Lambda, Step Functions, or App Runner to reduce infrastructure overhead.

Reduce your AWS bill with nOps

If you’ve run out of AWS credits and looking to reduce your cloud bill, nOps is and end-to-end automated optimization solution designed for you. At nOps, our mission is to make it easy for engineers to optimize, so you can focus on building and innovating.

nOps automates cost allocation & insights, commitment management, idle resource & storage cleanup, Spot, Kubernetes optimization, and the tools you need to support all of the other cost-saving strategies on this list. We were recently ranked #1 with five stars in G2’s cloud cost management category, and we optimize $2 billion in cloud spend for our customers.

Join our customers using nOps to effortlessly save on AWS by booking a demo today!