Google’s annual I/O conference usually ends with the developers in attendance walking away with a range of valuable tech devices, ranging from smartwatches to tablets to computers. This year, however, Google has opted to gift them with cloud credit.

Google I/O ended last Friday, but on Saturday the company sent out an email offering $500 in credit for their Google Cloud Platform. With approximately 7,000 attendees, that amounts to a potential $3.5 million in free cloud usage.

Catching up

The move comes after Google has struggled to catch up to the dominant public cloud companies, such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. In November 2015, Google hired Diane Greene, co-founder of VMware and founder of Bebop, as the senior vice president of Google’s cloud businesses to try to accelerate the company’s growth.

Speaking at San Francisco’s Structure conference that same month, senior VP of technical infrastructure Urs Hölzle said that “the goal is for us to talk about Google as a cloud company by 2020.”

However, Google is still significantly behind its rivals in market share, and doubt exists over its ability to gain ground, especially in light of the fact that its data centers are currently distributed in far fewer regions than its competitors.

For more on Google’s Data Center and Cloud strategy and geographical breakdown, go to DCDi Research.