Buyer's risk checklist for cloud credits
Twenty things to confirm before paying for discounted AWS, Azure, GCP, OpenAI or Anthropic credits, and the four deal structures where buyers lose money.
Buying discounted credits can be a sensible way to reduce a compute bill. It can also be a way to wire money to a stranger in exchange for access that stops working three weeks later, with no recourse. The difference is almost entirely in what you confirm before paying.
This is the checklist we would want a buyer to work through — including the parts that are inconvenient for us, because a buyer who gets burned does not come back.
The one thing to internalise first
A displayed balance is not permission to resell. A seller can show you a genuine screenshot of a genuine balance on an account they genuinely control, and the arrangement can still breach the provider's terms and be voided. Ownership, control and permission to transfer are three separate things, and a screenshot only ever speaks to the second one.
If you take nothing else from this page: price for the risk that the provider intervenes, and put in writing what happens if it does.
Before you talk about price
- Which programme issued the credit, not just which platform
- The remaining balance per credit line, not the original grant
- The expiry date on each line separately
- Applicable services, SKUs and regions, and anything excluded
- Whether the credit covers the spend you actually have
- What the provider's terms say about transfer, in the provider's own document
About the counterparty
- A real company, a domain, and a named person you can identify
- Some history you can check independently
- Willingness to answer detailed questions without pressure
- No urgency you did not create — urgency is the oldest pressure tactic there is
- Consistency between what they say and what the evidence shows
About the mechanism
- Exactly how the credit is supposed to reach your workload
- Whether that mechanism is permitted under the seller's agreement
- What access you receive, and what access the seller retains
- Who is liable for usage on the account during the arrangement
- How consumption is measured, and by whom
- What happens on the day the balance runs out
About the money and the paperwork
- A written agreement, even a short one
- An explicit clause on provider intervention: if credits are voided, who bears it
- Payment staged against delivery rather than paid in full up front
- No advance fee of any kind — see below
- A refund or remedy position you could actually enforce
The four structures where buyers lose money
1. Paying up front for a credential. You are given an API key or account login and pay in full. You have bought a revocable permission with no enforcement. The key can be rotated the day after payment clears. On OpenAI and Anthropic this also runs into the platforms' account-sharing terms, so you have no standing to complain to anyone.
2. The advance-fee variant. You are asked to pay a "verification", "escrow" or "release" fee before the credits are made available. This is a straightforward scam pattern and the credits never existed. Nobody legitimate asks you to send money in order to receive something.
3. Unbounded managed spend. You run workloads through the seller's account with no spend cap, no measurement agreement and no written terms. Both sides then disagree about what was consumed, and neither can prove it. On Anthropic, workspace-scoped keys with spend limits solve much of this — use them if that is the platform.
4. The entangled account transfer. You take over an account that turns out to carry production data, another customer's data, a domain someone else depends on, or IAM roles wired into systems you have never seen. The credits were the cheap part.
Questions that tell you a lot, quickly
Ask these early. The answers, and the willingness to give them, sort serious counterparties from the rest fast:
- Which programme did these credits come from, and can I see the grant?
- What does your agreement with the provider say about this arrangement?
- What happens, in writing, if the provider voids the balance?
- What is the expiry on each credit line?
- Why are you selling rather than using them?
That last one is not rhetorical. There are good answers — the company pivoted, changed provider, or over-bought for a project that got cancelled. Vague answers to a simple question are informative.
Where we fit, and where we do not
We introduce buyers and sellers after reviewing a listing by hand, and we tell sellers plainly when we think no permitted route exists. What we do not do is guarantee transferability, hold funds, or stand behind either side's performance. There is no escrow here. The diligence on this page is still yours to do, and any buyer who expects us to have done it for them has misunderstood what an introduction service is.
If you want to be introduced to sellers on a specific platform, tell us what you are looking for. If you are on the other side of this, start with how to value unused credits.
Related reading
- Are AWS credits transferable? — the constraint that creates the risk
- When do cloud and AI credits expire? — reading expiry correctly
- How we verify listings — what our review does and does not establish
- Refund and cancellation policy — what happens when a deal does not complete