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

Hey HN: I'm Kaveh, the founder of Usage (https://www.usage.ai/)

We help companies drive down AWS costs. Why? Because the way it's done now is a pain. Stakeholders, especially engineers, are required to spend unnecessary time manually finding underutilized or overly expensive EC2s. We believe the optimization process should be done automatically through a series of sophisticated algorithms. At the moment, there are over 70,000 AWS EC2 prices - doing that manually just won't scale at most organizations. My background is in software engineering.

Previous to founding Usage, I worked on high-performance computing research at JP Morgan Chase and as a software engineer at a number of smaller startups.

Here's how it works: We are typically hired by the head of engineering. Usage makes its initial analysis of your organization's AWS usage, then it's passed to a human that manually verifies each recommendation for correctness. The human in the loop may reach out to if they are unsure about a particular recommendation.

We make money off of a monthly subscription to manage all of your organization's AWS spend management. Our fee is based on your organization's size and ranges from $2.5k-$10k/month. Happy to chat directly kaveh@usage.ai

Have you experienced any issues with managing your company or organization's AWS expenses? We'd love to hear your feedback and ideas!

If it works then I would expect Amazon to acquire it so they can break it.

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 our scale but is still money that we can spend on other things.

That looks really neat. I guess it doesn't even have to be offline if you deploy it somewhere. I doubt we're currently at the scale to utilise this to its full potential but I've saved it for later.

How do you compare to CloudHealth?

I do cost optimisations for living and though there are a lot of tools, most of them are niche and doesn't scale well. For generic purpose I tend to use CloudHealth, but still we write a lot of scripts to do some custom managment.