Yeah, sorry if that came off as snarky; I appreciate the suggestion.

I guess I can understand the cost-cutting mentality that drives Google, AWS, etc. to limit these kinds of offers to "new customers" only. Just remember to consider what kind of incentives you're creating. By effectively punishing developers for being early adopters/experimenters, you're making them wary of signing up early for whatever new and interesting stuff you announce in the future.

Any suggestions for incentive systems that would be motivational for you? We want to help!

Full Disclosure: I work at Google on da Cloudz

There should be several types of free trials

1. Current type for new customers. Here's $500. Do whatever you want

2. For old customers who haven't ever used a free trial, give credit without limits (same as new customers)

3. For old customers who have used a free trial give credit only for services they haven't used

It's an interesting problem - the issue is that our trials are both money & time based ($300 for 60 days). So technically you've "used" your trial even if you do nothing for 2 months.

We do appreciate the feedback and are looking hard at the right next way to solve this. If it wasn't for bitcoin miners and/or bot nets, this would all be a lot easier :(

Full disclosure: I work at Google on Kubernetes.

Ah, interesting -- I thought it was for a year. Then I don't feel like I'm missing out quite so much, because I would have a hard time spending that much credit in 2 months anyway :)

And #3 can give the positive effect of converting existing paying customers on one product into paying customers on new products.

Got a fairly quick response from Google Cloud Billing Support:

"Unfortunately, the system is developed by design to only apply the free trial credit to new email address creating a new billing account and we can't apply it for already existing emails." Bummer.