after init hook? emacs startup hook?

Elpaca does its work asynchronously, after reading your init file. These means after-init-hook and emacs-startup-hook are run before packages are activated. Elpaca provides elpaca-after-init-hook, which is run after all queues in the init file are processed. You can add the following to the end of your init file if you must rely on after-init-hook or emacs-startup-hook, but it is better to use elpaca-after-init-hook:

;;END OF INIT FILE
;; prevents `elpaca-after-init-hook` from running more than once.
(setq elpaca-after-init-time (or elpaca-after-init-time (current-time)))
(elpaca-wait)