Comment by codingdave

> I'm convinced someone out there has figured out the playbook for turning cloud credits into serious money.

Yeah, the cloud provider figured that out. They shell out credits fairly freely to almost anyone who asks, knowing that one of two things will happen:

1) The recipient won't have a clue what to do with them, and it doesn't cost them much of anything at all to have offered them.

2) The recipient will find a way to turn them into profit, get themselves tied in to their selected vendor, and then become a profit center for the cloud platform.

Don't get me wrong, it is nice to have the credits. But it is a sales tactic - their cost to acquire you as a customer is just their actual underlying costs on whatever resources you spend. Win-win if you can make something of it, but the reason you aren't finding canned playbooks on what to do with them is that if you really knew how to turn them into profits, you never would have needed them in the first place.

So stop trying to minmax your profits, and just go play with the services. Learn everything you can, spend those credits to self-educate, and now you have more experience and skills to offer your next gig, which probably will pay better than starting a side project anywa.