Show HN: I built a service to help companies save on their AWS bills • Hacker News Board

Re: Show HN: I built a service to help companies save on their AWS bills

#41

Post by kavehkhorram » Fri, Jul 10, 2020, 7:04 AM UTC

mtnGoat wrote: post #40

kavehkhorram wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our recommendations break into two categories: 1. Annual recommendations (Reserved Instances, Savings Plans) Sure, if a company only wants these recommendations - they can bring on a contractor once per year to do these changes. This is the one-off fee type contractor the poster is talking about 2. Continuous recommendations (Rightsizing, Spot Management) These recommendations are typically not something you could do…

I don't agree with that cost comparison. I don't think you need a full time contractor for this, maybe just someone you pay to check things out for an hour or two per month. This is a task any reasonable skilled sysad or devops lead should be on top of as part of their daily work. I'd say managing our large(high 5 figures monthly) account takes less then two hours per month to audit.

It really depends on the size and configuration of the organization. It might be manageable at a few dozen people, but it becomes much more difficult to scale when you have 1,000+ engineers all working on different accounts with different architectures and requirements.

Additionally, our growth and enterprise plans all have guaranteed savings. 3x and 5x, respectively.

For instance, if you chose the growth plan ($5k/month) and saved less than $180k after 12 months, we'd give you a 100% refund.

Similarly, if you chose the enterprise plan ($10k/month) and saved less than $600k after 12 months, we'd give you a 100% refund.

Re: Show HN: I built a service to help companies save on their AWS bills

#42

Post by cregev » Fri, Jul 10, 2020, 9:53 AM UTC

guessmyname wrote: post #5

For an (offline) alternative, check out → https://github.com/similarweb/finala (written in Go) I started using Finala a couple of months ago out of experimentation, it works well, but you need to tweak the configuration a lot to help the tool understand your infrastructure, spending habits and normal usage. My colleagues are very happy with the results, we started saving ±1.8k per month, which is pocket change for ou…

That's amazing ... thank you for the feedback!

Re: Show HN: I built a service to help companies save on their AWS bills

#43

Post by cregev » Fri, Jul 10, 2020, 9:53 AM UTC

rmotta wrote: post #34

guessmyname wrote: post #5

For an (offline) alternative, check out → https://github.com/similarweb/finala (written in Go) I started using Finala a couple of months ago out of experimentation, it works well, but you need to tweak the configuration a lot to help the tool understand your infrastructure, spending habits and normal usage. My colleagues are very happy with the results, we started saving ±1.8k per month, which is pocket change for ou…

pretty cool! did you guys (or anyone) posted anything somewhere so we can check out about the usability/deploy/etc...?

Are you talking about Finala ?

Re: Show HN: I built a service to help companies save on their AWS bills

#44

Post by stratified » Sun, Jul 12, 2020, 2:43 AM UTC

[DISCLAIMER] software engineer @ AWS, not working on billing.

Interesting project! This product can unlock a lot of customer savings, and wishing you all the best.

I have a couple of questions:

- Are you focusing on EC2 compute costs or are you focusing on other AWS offerings as well? Curious to see how the savings compare to EC2 compute optimizer [1].

- How is your churn rate? What is the value of your product once a customer optimized their AWS bill?

- Do you have a screencast of your product?

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/compute-optimizer/

Re: Show HN: I built a service to help companies save on their AWS bills

#45

Post by kavehkhorram » Sun, Jul 12, 2020, 4:26 AM UTC

stratified wrote: post #44

[DISCLAIMER] software engineer @ AWS, not working on billing. Interesting project! This product can unlock a lot of customer savings, and wishing you all the best. I have a couple of questions: - Are you focusing on EC2 compute costs or are you focusing on other AWS offerings as well? Curious to see how the savings compare to EC2 compute optimizer [1]. - How is your churn rate? What is the value of your product once…

1. We're currently focused on EC2s (it's been the largest line item for our first few customers).

2. Rightsizing and spot fleet management keep our users coming back - but our customers get the most value the first month. Almost all of our customers have renewed their subscriptions after the first month so far.

3. I don't know how well the computer optimizer model performs, but we haven't had a customer take a recommendation and regret it later on. For our enterprise plan, we fine-tune our models to a company's historical usage (rather than throw a standardized model at all of our users).

Happy to share a screencast! Feel free to email me if you'd like.