(I work at Stripe.)

Here's the story on partner credits: A thing we do at Stripe Atlas is go to companies in the ecosystem whose services we like and ask them to bid on the opportunity to support a large cohort of Internet businesses. They then do so and communicate this to us on, essentially, a handshake: we act as a channel for them and in return they give our customers (and not us) some benefit.

Partners occasionally change their mind about internal thresholds for marketing promotions, which sometimes moves their operational processes about the deal that Stripe Atlas users will get going forward. They do not always communicate this to us in real time.

As we've learned more about this over the years, we've tried to update our language to convey that these sort of credits are up to the partners. (We have seen customers get $5k or other amounts and, ultimately, that is at Amazon's discretion.) I'll check later today to make sure we're using the newer "up to" language throughout our docs.

We hope this strikes the right balance of predictability for new Stripe Atlas users and getting the best support from the ecosystem for your new endeavors.