Google Inc. is seeking to temp entrepreunerial startups with a cool $100,000 in credit so long as they power their apps using its cloud platform rather than their rivals.

The new program is called Google Cloud Platform for Startups, and was announced last Friday at its Google for Entrepreneurs Partner Summit.

“This offer supports our core Google Cloud Platform philosophy: we want developers to focus on code; not worry about managing infrastructure,” wrote Google’s Julie Pearl in a blog post. “Starting today, startups can take advantage of this offer and begin using the same infrastructure platform we use at Google.”

The idea is a smart one from Google’s point of view, because a startup that’s using its cloud is unlikely to want to migrate its infrastructure to a competitor later on.

Google’s offer of $100,000 credit is good for a year, and it says participants can mix and match its cloud services like App Engine, Big Query, Cloud Storage, Cloud SQL, Compute Engine, its translation and machine-learning APIs etc. Also thrown in is 24 hour telephone support, plus something called “office hours”, which Google describes as “1:1 technical architecture reviews with Cloud Platform solutions engineers.”

Naturally, such a generous offer does come with a few catches though. The offer is only available once – those companies that have received Cloud Platform credits in the past won’t be able to take advantage of it again. Google also says its offer is only open to ‘real startups’ who meet its qualifying criteria of less than $5million in funding received and less than $500,000 annual revenues.

But before every unqualified Joe tries to jump on Google’s cloud, note that companies aren’t allowed to apply for the program by themselves. Google says it only wants to work with approved accelerators, incubators and venture funds, and companies will have to go through these partners to apply for the credit.

Google has teamed up with over 50 global partners (accelerators, incubators and venture funds) to make this offer possible, but for those startups working with a partner who isn’t currently onboard, they can contact Google and get it added to the list.

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