$100k startup credits but every quota increase request gets auto-denied. How to scale?
We're a tech startup on the Google for Startups program with $100k in credits. The workload is highly parallel scientific computing that we've containerised and run on Cloud Batch. Pipeline works, pilot runs fine. On a single VM the full run takes 5-6 days; on Batch with 1500-2000 Spot vCPUs it's about 6 hours.
Problem: our quota is stuck at <100 vCPUs and a tiny persistent disk allocation, and every increase request through the console gets denied within minutes. no reason given beyond the generic "not eligible at this time". We have $100k of credits we literally cannot spend.
we're stuck in a catch-22, can’t build spend history because we can't get quota, can't get quota without spend history.
So..
Did buying a paid support plan (Standard) and filing the quota request as a support case actually get you to a human?
Is there a functioning escalation path through the startup program itself? We got the credits through the program but it's not obvious who to contact about quota.
It feels absurd to be handed $100k and then rate-limited to compute smaller than my laptop.