ClickHouse Cloud for YC - $10,000 in credits
Source: https://clickhouse.com/deals/ycombinator
Description
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+ 1 $10,000 in ClickHouse Cloud credits valid for 24 months for current Y Combinator portfolio companies, plus ClickHouse Basic Support, a one-hour expert training session, and joint promotion (blog post, social channels, speaking opportunities at community events). If you are not a YC company, the only ClickHouse-specific freebie is the $400 AWS Activate Exclusive Offer for ClickHouse Cloud, on top of the standard $300 / 30-day free trial that any new account gets.
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+ 3 ClickHouse Cloud is a managed, columnar OLAP database used by OpenAI, Anthropic, Tesla, eBay, LangChain, and Weights & Biases for sub-second analytics over billions of rows — so $10K of credits is meaningful runway for an analytics-heavy product (logs, observability, product analytics, real-time dashboards).
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+ 10 You must satisfy all of these:
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+ 11
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+ 12 • Currently part of the Y Combinator program (active portfolio company — alumni status alone is not enough; you need a valid YC secret code)
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+ 13 • Have not raised Series D or beyond (anything Seed → Series C is fine)
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+ 14 • Not already a paying ClickHouse Cloud customer (you can have signed up for the free trial — see step-by-step below)
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+ 15 • You can produce your YC secret code for verification
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+ 16
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+ 18 • You are an AWS Activate member (Founders, Portfolio, or Builders tier — Founders is self-serve and only needs a startup website + LinkedIn)
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+ 19 • New to ClickHouse Cloud (offer is for first-time customers)
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+ 20 • You sign up for ClickHouse Cloud through the AWS Activate Exclusive Offers page, not directly on clickhouse.com
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+ 21
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+ 23 • $300 in credits, 30 days, full feature access — no eligibility gate beyond email signup. Available via direct signup, AWS Marketplace, or Azure Marketplace (all three give $300).
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+ 29 1. Go to clickhouse.com/cloud and click "Get started for free" to create a ClickHouse Cloud account (email + password, or SSO).
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+ 30 2. Once inside the console, create an organization if you don't already have one — note your Organization ID (visible in the org settings). You'll need it for the application.
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+ 31 3. Spin up a service so the account is non-empty (the free trial $300 starts here, but it will be superseded when the YC credits are applied).
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+ 32 4. Go to clickhouse.com/deals/ycombinator and click "Apply now".
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+ 33 5. Fill out the application form: company name, your YC batch, YC secret code, your ClickHouse Organization ID, expected use case.
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+ 34 6. Submit and wait for the ClickHouse team to review and approve (typically a few business days).
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+ 35 7. Once approved, the $10,000 credit (valid 24 months) is applied to your organization's billing balance — you can verify it under Billing in the console.
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+ 36 8. Your account manager will reach out to schedule the one-hour expert training and discuss the joint blog post / promotion opportunities.
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+ 37
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+ 38 Important:
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+ 39 • The $10K credits stack on top of any unspent free-trial credit ($300), but ClickHouse may apply the YC credits before remaining trial credit — verify in Billing.
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+ 40 • Once credits are exhausted (or the 24 months elapse), you transition to standard pay-as-you-go pricing — set a billing alert to avoid surprise charges.
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+ 41 • If your YC company is later acquired or pivots into something not on YC's roster, your eligibility may be revisited.
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+ 47 1. Confirm you have an active AWS Activate membership (sign up at aws.amazon.com/activate — Founders tier needs only a startup website + LinkedIn).
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+ 48 2. Log in to the AWS Activate Console and open the Exclusive Offers section.
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+ 49 3. Find the ClickHouse Cloud offer card and click through to aws.amazon.com/startups/offers/clickhouse.
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+ 50 4. Follow the linked signup flow — this routes you to a ClickHouse signup that is tagged with the Activate promo. Do not sign up via clickhouse.com directly; the $400 only applies when you go through this funnel.
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+ 51 5. The $400 credit is applied to your new ClickHouse Cloud organization. It can be combined with the standard $300 / 30-day free trial in some cases — check the offer page T&Cs at the time you sign up.
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+ 52
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+ 53 Important:
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+ 54 • The $400 credit and the $10K YC credit are mutually exclusive in practice — you'd take the YC track if eligible.
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+ 55 • If you are a YC company who already burned the Activate $400, you can still apply for the $10K YC track as long as you are not yet a paying customer (i.e., you haven't been billed beyond the credit).
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+ 61 FeatureIncluded on Free / TrialIncluded with $10K YC Credits
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+ 62 Managed ClickHouse (columnar OLAP)YesYes
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+ 63 Auto-scaling compute (idle to multi-replica)YesYes
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+ 64 Object-storage backed (S3/GCS/Azure Blob) — pay only for storage you useYesYes
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+ 65 Multi-AZ replicationYesYes
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+ 66 Encryption at rest & in transitYesYes
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+ 67 Basic Support (email/ticket)LimitedYes (included with YC)
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+ 68 One-hour expert training sessionNoYes
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+ 69 Joint blog post + ClickHouse channel promotionNoYes
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+ 70 Speaking opportunities at community eventsNoYes
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+ 71 Cloud regions: AWS, GCP, Azure (multiple regions each)YesYes
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+ 77 Use it for:
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+ 78 • Product analytics & event tracking (replacing/augmenting Mixpanel, Amplitude, PostHog at scale)
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+ 79 • Logs / observability (alternative to Datadog logs, Loki at high volume)
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+ 80 • Real-time dashboards over billions of rows
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+ 81 • Data warehousing for AI/LLM telemetry (token counts, latencies, prompts) — this is exactly why Anthropic and OpenAI use it
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+ 82
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+ 83 Don't use it for:
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+ 84 • Transactional workloads (it's OLAP, not OLTP — use Postgres/Neon for those)
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+ 85 • Tiny datasets (<10M rows) where Postgres is simpler and free
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+ 86 • Use cases that need frequent row-level updates / deletes
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+ 91
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+ 92 • 24-month window is generous — most startup programs are 12 months. Plan a real production migration, not just a POC.
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+ 93 • Bring your own region — pick the AWS/GCP/Azure region closest to your app to minimize egress; egress out of ClickHouse Cloud is metered against your credits.
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+ 94 • Use ClickPipes (managed ingestion from Kafka, Postgres CDC, S3) — these are billable but the YC credits cover them, and they save weeks of plumbing work.
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+ 95 • Combine with related offers: many YC startups also stack Neon's $100K credits, Datadog $30-100K, and PostHog $50K. ClickHouse + Neon + PostHog is a popular YC AI-startup data stack.
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+ 96 • Watch for ClickHouse OSS — if you outgrow the cloud credits, the open-source database is fully free and runs on any GPU/CPU box. Migration path is straightforward (same SQL dialect).
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+ 97 • Limited Access models — the $10K credit applies to all ClickHouse Cloud features; there are no gated features that require additional approval beyond what's in the standard product.
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+ 101 Sources:
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+ 102 • ClickHouse x Y Combinator Deal Page
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+ 103 • ClickHouse Activate Offer (AWS Startups)
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+ 104 • ClickHouse blog — Unlocking big data potential for startups (AWS Activate promo)
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+ 105 • ClickHouse Cloud Pricing
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+ 106 • ClickHouse Cloud Billing Docs
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+ 107 • AWS Marketplace: ClickHouse Cloud
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+ 108 • AWS Activate Offers
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