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

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

#31

Post by kavehkhorram »

stunt wrote: post #12
petargyurov wrote: post #6

Maybe I'm missing the point, but why wouldn't a company hire a contractor to do the same thing you do for a one-off fee? I just don't see why this is a subscription model. Of course, a company's usage will change over time, but I don't see how that's worth the monthly fees advertised. > optimization process should be done automatically through a series of sophisticated algorithms > ...then it's passed to a human that…

I guess many companies just have so much room to save on their AWS bills. So the service quickly pays for itself. It's fine to keep the subscription at least for a while and maybe later switch to periodically model if the only feature it offers is saving. But usually it's also about visibility. Services like CloudHealth give you much better billing overview than what AWS gives you. Without that data you may have a lo…

You hit it right on the head, stunt!

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

#32

Post by kavehkhorram »

dave_sid wrote: post #30

I like this. What a great idea for a consultancy. There must be so many organisations that are paying way more than they need by not tweaking each aws service they are using. Anything from using the wrong S3 storage type to using ECS when they could switch to Fargate.

You're exactly right. We've even seen very small pre-seed companies (with just a handful of EC2s) throwing away a few thousand dollars annually in extra charges to AWS. The problem becomes even bigger at large companies.

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

#33

Post by dave_sid »

kavehkhorram wrote: post #32
dave_sid wrote: post #30

I like this. What a great idea for a consultancy. There must be so many organisations that are paying way more than they need by not tweaking each aws service they are using. Anything from using the wrong S3 storage type to using ECS when they could switch to Fargate.

You're exactly right. We've even seen very small pre-seed companies (with just a handful of EC2s) throwing away a few thousand dollars annually in extra charges to AWS. The problem becomes even bigger at large companies.

If you could somehow automate this and provide a tool that did analysis of a companies aws stack usage over a month and suggest configuration changes that would be a big thing.

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

#34

Post by rmotta »

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...?

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

#36

Post by kavehkhorram »

dave_sid wrote: post #33
kavehkhorram wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're exactly right. We've even seen very small pre-seed companies (with just a handful of EC2s) throwing away a few thousand dollars annually in extra charges to AWS. The problem becomes even bigger at large companies.

If you could somehow automate this and provide a tool that did analysis of a companies aws stack usage over a month and suggest configuration changes that would be a big thing.

That's what Usage does - we aren't a consultancy to be clear. We automate all of our recommendations (and occasionally add a human layer above it)

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

#37

Post by mindhash »

kavehkhorram wrote: post #32
dave_sid wrote: post #30

I like this. What a great idea for a consultancy. There must be so many organisations that are paying way more than they need by not tweaking each aws service they are using. Anything from using the wrong S3 storage type to using ECS when they could switch to Fargate.

You're exactly right. We've even seen very small pre-seed companies (with just a handful of EC2s) throwing away a few thousand dollars annually in extra charges to AWS. The problem becomes even bigger at large companies.

That reminds me early stage startup’s betting big on Kubernetes

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

#40

Post by mtnGoat »

kavehkhorram wrote: post #23
oars wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You missed the first question: > why wouldn't a company hire a contractor to do the same thing you do for a one-off fee? I just don't see why this is a subscription model This is something I am curious about as well.

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.
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