Free cloud credits feel like a gift. And in the early days, they are. They get you moving. They remove friction. They let you build without asking permission from finance.
But credits are not free money. They are deferred decisions.
The first cost is architectural laziness. When compute feels infinite, discipline slips. Instances stay oversized. Logs grow unchecked. Experiments never get cleaned up. Nothing hurts because nothing is billed. Then the credits run out and the bill arrives carrying every shortcut you forgot you took.
The second cost is lock in by habit, not contract. Teams optimise around the tools that came with the credits. Monitoring. Identity. Pipelines. Before anyone notices, the product assumes a specific cloud shape. Migrating later is no longer a technical choice. It is a rewrite.
There is also a pricing blind spot. Credits hide unit economics. You think a feature is cheap because you never paid for it. You price the product accordingly. When real costs surface, margins disappear and pricing suddenly feels political. That is a hard conversation to have after customers are trained.
Another quiet cost shows up in behaviour. Engineers stop asking what something costs. Product stops asking what something is worth. Cost awareness is a muscle. Credits atrophy it.
None of this means you should refuse credits. That would be naive. The trick is to treat them like a loan, not a grant.
Track usage as if you were paying from day one. Set internal budgets even when the external bill is zero. Design with portability in mind, even if you never use it. And force yourself to model what happens the month after the credits end.
The most dangerous thing about free cloud credits is not the spend.
It is the false sense of sustainability.
Build as if the bill is real. Because soon enough, it will be.
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