Ask HN: How to turn AWS credits into real $$$?

[anonymous3829]

I won a few hackathons recently and received $100k+ worth of AWS, Azure, and GCP credits. This is cool, but I'm currently unemployed and could use some cash right now.

There are some restrictions:

* You cannot transfer credits nor put them on an organization -> all instances have to be created by one user

* There are restrictions on crypto mining

* The credits are only valid for 1 year

Some ideas I've considered so far

* Creating a wrapper around all the LLM APIs (e.g. GPT-4, Claude, LlaMa2) and selling it at a large discount

* Reaching out to small startups to offload some of their AWS bill

* Create a white-glove service for deploying their stuff

Does anyone have a better idea?

[ac2u]

This is like that class study they did where they gave groups of students $5 to start a business and most groups focused myopically on the $5 in terms of what resources it could buy (materials for car wash etc).

The winning group ignored the $5 and sold slots to corporate recruiters to come and speak to their class of almost-graduates and made many times more money than most other groups.

What I'm saying is to use the credits as hosting for projects (like your hackathon entries) to build your skills and give you an edge for the job you want. The credit bonuses on most cloud providers aren't completely analogous to 100k of cash spend anyway because the credits will work on some services but not others.

[dodoc → ac2u]

Seconded. I was in a similar position and then realized I’d never get “unlimited” access to try all the Azure services like that. Tried them all without worrying about the cash aspect, and learned a ton.

[theossuary]

You could put up a professional services marketplace item for yourself; then hire yourself with your credits, and bill hours. You'd probably want to do actual work to make it not blatant fraud; eh who am I kidding it'd 100% be some sort of fraud. Now if you had a friend...

I guess you could just put up a really expensive AMI on the marketplace too.

https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/partners/professional-ser...

[snisarenko]

Some random ideas

- run open source LLM models as an API, sell access at a steep discount

- run video comprehension service, sell at a discount

- run a remote build Service at a discount

If you actually want to use the credits as leverage to enter an actual SaaS market. Pick a commodity SaaS service, add a small twist on it and sell at steep discount to gain market share

- dropbox alternative

- YouTube alternative

- S3 / backblaze alternative

- Vercel / Netlify alternative

[thynker]

You could try fine-tuning a few models and selling that? Although fine-tuning doesn't cost as much money nowadays

[amerkhalid]

Offering gaming servers might be an option. Just make sure you don’t give out root access to anyone.

[bestbuyer__]

You could try BlackHat forums, I think there's a market for it