Applied for $7,000+ in startup credits (AWS, Azure, Sentry). Here's what each application actually took

Got approved for three separate startup credit programs this month. AWS Activate, Microsoft for Startups, and Sentry for Startups. Over $7,000 combined. Wanted to share the actual numbers and what each one took, since "apply for startup credits" gets thrown around vaguely.

AWS Activate, Founders tier
$1,000 base plus smaller credits for specific actions (setting up a cost budget, creating an RDS instance), landing around $1,140 total. Applied through the Founders track since ClientFlo isn't VC-backed. Approval took about a week. No demo required, just a clear description of the product and how AWS is actually used in the stack.

Microsoft for Startups
$1,000 in Azure credits, full amount, none used yet beyond a few dollars of testing. Separate application from AWS, different reviewer, different questions. I'm not primarily on Azure, but this covers experimenting with Azure AI Foundry, currently running DeepSeek there for some tooling work.

Sentry for Startups
$5,000 in credits, the biggest single grant of the three. This one mattered most practically; error tracking is not optional once you have any real users, and $29/mo on the Team plan adds up over a year when you're bootstrapped.

What actually helped
None of these are rubber-stamp approvals. Each application forced me to write the ClientFlo pitch differently; AWS wanted infra justification, Sentry wanted to know what "startup" actually meant for a solo, pre-revenue founder. Writing three versions of the same pitch clarified messaging I'd been fuzzy on everywhere else.

ClientFlo launches in the next couple of days. This was credits and paperwork, next post is the actual thing.