Over the last few years, I have started cleaning up my digital act and reduce my usage of Google and Facebook.
Although quite easy to drop Facebook, Google has been somewhat harder. The problem is that their products just… work. At low usage, they tend not to be expensive, and at the end of the day, there is this warm feeling that you are in safe hands.
It was in that spirit that Snoofa made the decision to shun Amazon Web Services and use Google Cloud Platform instead for all things Cloud. Because we are fairly high users of Google Cloud and because Snoofa as a company also runs on Google Workspaces, we have a close relationship with the organisation via our Account Manager. It was he who suggested that we apply to be part of the Google for Startups Cloud Program. Although we are a bootstrap company (and proud of it), and not the recipient of venture capital, Google placed us in the Scale Tier program.
Overall this gives us up to $200,000 worth of servers and services to play with over the next two years. Free products are nearly always a good thing, but coupled alongside that is the knowledge that Google can see what a good job we are doing and support us accordingly.
In practical terms, this means that Snoofa has access to a vast amount of resources from Google, from Google Compute Engine, through BigQuery, all the way to Gartner-endorsed Cloud AI tools. We should be the most robust provider imaginable, and with access to hundreds of Google services, the world is our lobster.