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Launch HN: Infracost (YC W21) – open-source cloud cost estimator

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Re: Launch HN: Infracost (YC W21) – open-source cloud cost estimator

#21

Post by sandGorgon »

hkh wrote: post #15
sandGorgon wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

per-user is tricky. I can have a super duper complex terraform repo with just 1 user and a 10 liner repo with 5 people. you should do a "build minutes" kind of pricing. or the number of times i triggered a re-run. From your perspective, it can only be better than per-user, since the number of commits will be minimally proportional to the number of users.

Good point. I wonder as the world goes more towards serveless, if users will slowly become used to per call (or maybe per comment, or as you say per re-run) pricing

its already normal right ? Github Pipelines or CI/CD bill this way. Actually the best example of this abstraction was Heroku with its "dynos".

Re: Launch HN: Infracost (YC W21) – open-source cloud cost estimator

#22

Post by [deleted] »

hkh wrote: post #15
sandGorgon wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

per-user is tricky. I can have a super duper complex terraform repo with just 1 user and a 10 liner repo with 5 people. you should do a "build minutes" kind of pricing. or the number of times i triggered a re-run. From your perspective, it can only be better than per-user, since the number of commits will be minimally proportional to the number of users.

Good point. I wonder as the world goes more towards serveless, if users will slowly become used to per call (or maybe per comment, or as you say per re-run) pricing

[deleted]

Re: Launch HN: Infracost (YC W21) – open-source cloud cost estimator

#23

Post by hkh »

sandGorgon wrote: post #21
hkh wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good point. I wonder as the world goes more towards serveless, if users will slowly become used to per call (or maybe per comment, or as you say per re-run) pricing

its already normal right ? Github Pipelines or CI/CD bill this way. Actually the best example of this abstraction was Heroku with its "dynos".

Yea! Very true. and exactly as you say, CI/CD is going that way as well and we fit in there, so it would make sense for our pricing to fit that.

Re: Launch HN: Infracost (YC W21) – open-source cloud cost estimator

#24

Post by vegannet »

I love the idea but one of the challenges I’ve found at quite a few companies is a difficulty across the organisation in understanding the true cost of infrastructure: I’ve experienced situations in which putting the $ upfront causes people to focus on the $ amount.

Do you have a guide for how this information should be used most effectively? I’m thinking of co-workers who would request a change that reduces the monthly cost by $10 but the time it takes to go through the code review and make the change and test it... by that point any $ cost saving has been spent on the time it spent in code review.

My instinct is that perhaps rather than reporting the $ or % change, instead projects could have alarms / limits on cost increases, but I’m not so sure if that is really tackling the problem.

Re: Launch HN: Infracost (YC W21) – open-source cloud cost estimator

#25

Post by aliscott »

vegannet wrote: post #24

I love the idea but one of the challenges I’ve found at quite a few companies is a difficulty across the organisation in understanding the true cost of infrastructure: I’ve experienced situations in which putting the $ upfront causes people to focus on the $ amount. Do you have a guide for how this information should be used most effectively? I’m thinking of co-workers who would request a change that reduces the mont…

You're right. It has to be a balance between the cost of the infrastructure and the developer's time. One feature we have for this is to only show comments in PRs if the cost increase is above a certain threshold.

Another idea we have is to allow developers to set alerts based on their actual project/IaC concepts instead of configuring alerts based on tags and services. Do you think this would help?

Re: Launch HN: Infracost (YC W21) – open-source cloud cost estimator

#27

Post by aliscott »

hbharadwaj wrote: post #26

How is this different from Terraform Cloud's cost estimation please? https://www.terraform.io/docs/cloud/cost-estimation/index.ht...

We are free and open source and support more AWS and Google services (https://www.infracost.io/docs/supported_resources).

We also fit in with existing toolsets - we think it’s important that users don’t need to change their workflow, so we integrate with different ways of running Terraform (Terragrunt, Terraform Cloud) different source control systems (GitHub, GitLab, etc) and CI/CD systems (Atlantis, CircleCI).

We also have additional features, like the ability to specify resource usage (for data transfer and Lambda, etc) and generate HTML and JSON reports so it can be integrated into your own systems.

Re: Launch HN: Infracost (YC W21) – open-source cloud cost estimator

#30

Post by manishsharan »

I wish you would add support for Azure sooner and also VMWare VMC cloud. I literally have to deliver cost estimate comparison of deploying our micro services to AKS vs VMC cluster. I have a tedious excel spreadsheet open that I am currently plugging in numbers to come up with estimates and comparison.

edit : just adding that this is the suckiest part of my job and I fully expect to be grilled by management for every little cell in the spreadsheet

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