We're in AWS Activate, with $25,000 in cloud credits
By Provsy Team
The acceptance email from AWS Activate landed on March 31st, which means we get to publish this on April 1st and promise you it isn't a joke: Provsy has been accepted into the program, with $25,000 in AWS credits.
If you haven't come across it, Activate is the program AWS runs for early-stage startups. Instead of cash, it provides credits toward cloud infrastructure. For a team our size the distinction barely matters. Infrastructure is one of our biggest real costs, and every naira we don't spend on servers is a naira that goes into the product.
The unglamorous work the credits pay for
Most of what people see of Provsy is the fast part: a teacher picks a class and subject, and in under ten minutes there's a complete exam paper, aligned to the syllabus, checked for bias, formatted for print or for students to take online. What nobody sees is everything holding that up. Every generated paper is stored and versioned. Every revision PDF a student downloads has to be built and kept somewhere. Every student sitting an online assessment through the portal is a live session that cannot be allowed to drop mid-exam.
Then there's the calendar. A school's demand isn't smooth. It spikes hard around exam weeks, and it spikes for every school at the same time. We're heading into the heaviest months of our year, and for the first time we won't be watching the infrastructure bill climb at the same rate as the traffic.
There's a pricing angle to this too. Our plans run from ₦200,000 to ₦800,000 per term, every one of them with unlimited teacher accounts, and a Standard school can generate 150 exams and 300 tests in a single term. Those numbers only stay generous if the cost of serving them keeps falling. Credits like these are part of how we hold the line on pricing without quietly capping what schools actually use.
One honest note: credits aren't revenue, and they expire. What they buy is time, the freedom to build the more resilient version of Provsy, with redundant storage and proper failover, before we strictly need it rather than after we learn why we needed it.
If you run a school and want to see what your teachers could do with ten minutes, talk to us.