A grant pays for the resources. It does not write the Terraform, wire the service accounts, or connect one application to another. RAD does that part — into your own Google Cloud project, or into a governed project it creates for you. Start with 300 credits and no card. RAD is in beta.
Not into the product. Into the fortnight before the product, which happens again on the next environment, and again when a second engineer joins.
No investor, customer or user has ever asked to see your service-account layout. It still has to exist, be correct, and be redone the first time you need a second environment.
One technical mentor in a hub answers the same networking question for the twelfth founder this quarter. The answer is identical every time and it is not written down anywhere the next founder will find it.
Scripts that one person understands, a wiki page that is three months stale, and a deployment nobody else can reproduce. It works right up until the person who wrote it takes a holiday.
Console clicks leave no artefact. When someone technical finally inspects what you built, there is nothing to read except the running resources themselves.
Most products need several things running, not one. RAD's catalogue holds 354 deployment options across 190 applications and platform modules, and 62 pre-composed solutions that deploy several applications together as one dependency-ordered unit. Counted 2026-08-17.
The 62 solutions define 291 member deployments drawn from 151 distinct applications. Members with no prerequisite provision at the same time, three at once; a member that consumes another member's Terraform outputs waits for that specific deployment to finish.
For eight producer-and-consumer pairs, RAD is designed to copy the producer's real Terraform outputs into the consumer's configuration before it builds — Elasticsearch into RAGFlow and Zammad, Ollama and LiteLLM into OpenWebUI, ClickHouse into Plausible, Gitea into Woodpecker, Synapse into Element, Directus into Meilisearch. That covers eight of the 62 solutions; in the other 54 you make every connection between members yourself afterwards, and the automatic part is a beta capability.
More than nine in ten finish inside 30, measured from provisioning time on real deployments to 2026-08-17, not a marketing figure. Build cost is metered from the same clock, so a fast build costs less than a slow one.
A solution reserves its cost as one sum across every member, discounted 15% for three to four modules, 20% for five to six and 25% for seven or more.
At some point somebody technical who does not work for you will look at your infrastructure — an acquirer's engineer, an investor's technical adviser, or the first senior hire who has to own it. What they open matters.
What RAD provisions is standard Terraform in a Google Cloud project you own. It is not a proprietary abstraction that has to be explained before it can be judged. One caveat to put in the data room yourself rather than let a reviewer find: the Terraform state is held in RAD's Cloud Storage, not yours, and the product has no state download today.
Nothing your users touch resolves to us. RAD provisions and steps out of the way, so the dependency question — "what happens to them if you disappear?" — has a short answer.
Stop using RAD and the resources continue exactly as they are, in your project, under your billing account. Nothing has to be moved. What does not come with you is the state file, which stays in RAD's bucket — so a team that wants to keep managing those resources as code re-adopts them into a state file of its own. And if the account goes quiet with no purchased credits, RAD deletes its record and that state after the retention period, warning you by email first. Your resources are untouched by that.
If you cannot get a Google Cloud billing account set up — or simply do not want to run one yet — RAD creates and governs a project for you. It lands in one of four tiers, each a separate Google Cloud folder with its own policy set, so one tier's rules cannot drift into another's, and in one region in each of eight geographies: us-central1, europe-north2, northamerica-south1, me-west1, africa-south1, asia-east1, australia-southeast2 and southamerica-west1.
Each of the eight was chosen as the cheapest available region in its geography, measured from the Cloud Billing Catalog API. If you use your own Google Cloud project instead, every region Google offers stays available to you.
The production tier carries development's ceilings: 48 Compute Engine vCPU and 32 Cloud Run vCPU per region, 32 GB of Memorystore Redis per region, 1 TiB of BigQuery scan a day, and no GPUs. If your workload grows past one of those, it is refused until that specific quota is raised for your project, which is a conversation with us rather than a setting you can change. Worth knowing before you put something with real traffic on it. In your own Google Cloud project, none of these apply.
Be precise about what that is: a Google Cloud budget alert notifies as spend approaches and exceeds a figure. It does not block an API call, and we will not pretend otherwise.
If your purchased credit balance goes negative, RAD is designed to disable Google Cloud billing on the project it created for you, and to restore it when you top up. It only ever reverses a suspension it applied itself.
Creating a managed project is not something free monthly credits can do. The minimum is set per tier, appropriate to what that tier can do — 347 of the 354 module options are eligible to go into one.
Two payment rails, because a checkout that does not accept your money is the same as a product you cannot buy.
RAD accepts payment through Stripe and through Flutterwave. Flutterwave offers card, bank transfer, USSD and mobile money, so a founder without an internationally accepted card still has a route to buying credits.
Checkout is hosted by the payment provider. Credits are granted only after that provider confirms the payment, on the server, once per payment.
A RAD-managed project can be created in africa-south1, Google Cloud's only African region, or in any of the other seven. Your own project keeps the full set.
Credits are the unit: 10 credits = $1. Two things are charged, and you see the first one before you confirm anything.
No payment method is required to sign up. Free users deploy into their own Google Cloud project and pay Google directly for the resources.
Nine of the 354 options carry no module fee at all, including the one that creates a RAD-managed project. Whatever the fee is, it is shown in the confirmation step before provisioning starts, alongside the balance it will be taken from. A failed build carries no module fee.
Charged at a published per-hour credit rate against the time the build really took. More than half of recorded deployments finish inside 20 minutes, and more than nine in ten inside 30.
Free monthly awards refresh each month and do not accumulate; subscription credits currently roll over into the next cycle; credits you buy outright never expire. Spending always draws on the soonest-to-expire balance first.
If you run a cohort, RAD can give every founder a real, governed Google Cloud project on the same morning — and the commercial arrangement is worth stating plainly before anything else.
A RAD administrator sets the roster for you — up to 30 participants, and a longer list is refused on save with a message that says so. One action from the ordinary deploy form then provisions one deployment per participant.
The participant owns the project and the deployment, and credits are debited from each participant — never from the programme. Every founder needs their own funded account. This is a commercial fact, not a footnote.
A programme lead can see and tear down what they provisioned, and can never read secrets or deployment outputs. Ask an administrator to strike a name from the roster and the access ends with it, because membership is re-checked on every request. A roster does not lapse by itself, so emptying it is what closes a programme out.
RAD supports referral and revenue-share arrangements for organisations that bring cohorts. We will describe the mechanism and agree the terms with you directly; we publish no earnings figures, because we have none we could stand behind.
It shipped in August 2026 and is newer than the rest of the platform. We want pilot partners and we would rather say that than let you find out afterwards. If you run a programme, talk to us and we will work through it with you.
Three reasons to close this tab, offered before you spend an afternoon finding them yourself.
Every module targets Google Cloud, and Terraform is the contract. If you have already committed to a different provider, nothing in the catalogue helps you.
If your whole product is one container that one person will maintain forever, a small host will cost you less. RAD pays off when there are several things to run and they have to be governed.
The catalogue, the engine and the documentation are built and running. Cohort provisioning and trainer roles shipped in August 2026 and are early access. Decide with that in front of you.
Sign up, pick something from the catalogue, and deploy it into your own Google Cloud project. If you do not have one yet, RAD will create a governed project for you. If you run a hub or an accelerator, tell us about your cohort instead.
RAD is in beta. The platform, catalogue and documentation described here are built and running; features marked as early access are newer and we say so where that is true. Catalogue figures counted 2026-08-17.