
Show HN: I built a service to help companies save on their AWS bills - kavehkhorram
Hey HN: I&#x27;m Kaveh, the founder of Usage (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.usage.ai&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.usage.ai&#x2F;</a>)<p>We help companies drive down AWS costs. Why? Because the way it&#x27;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&#x27;t scale at most organizations.
My background is in software engineering.<p>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.<p>Here&#x27;s how it works: We are typically hired by the head of engineering. Usage makes its initial analysis of your organization&#x27;s AWS usage, then it&#x27;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.<p>We make money off of a monthly subscription to manage all of your organization&#x27;s AWS spend management. Our fee is based on your organization&#x27;s size and ranges from $2.5k-$10k&#x2F;month. Happy to chat directly kaveh@usage.ai<p>Have you experienced any issues with managing your company or organization&#x27;s AWS expenses? We&#x27;d love to hear your feedback and ideas!
======
MaxBarraclough
Related reading: _Ask HN: How did you significantly reduce your AWS cost?_
(2017) [0]

The top comment is great. Two easy wins:

* Putting an S3 endpoint in your VPC gives any traffic to S3 its own internal route, so it's not billed like public traffic. (It's curious that this isn't the default.)

* Auto-shutdown your test servers overnight and on the weekends

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15587627](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15587627)

------
guessmyname
For an (offline) alternative, check out →
[https://github.com/similarweb/finala](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.

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

------
petargyurov
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 manually verifies each recommendation
> for correctness

So how much of the heavy lifting is actually done by the algorithms?

~~~
stunt
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 lot of blind spots and budget management is much harder. I think
the long term value is billing visibility even for companies with good AWS
experts.

I think the math behind saving algorithms isn't too complicated. It's just
hard to get it around your head specially when you have too many resources. So
it's not practical to do it without these tools.

You will be surprised how much inefficiency developers can produce. Especially
with infrastructure as code it's just too easy to create oversized resources
and forget about them.

Many companies also have a lot of inefficiency with their architecture. So it
makes sense to outsource savings on EC2 instances to a service like this and
let your internal talents to focus on architecture optimizations where you can
probably even save more money.

~~~
kavehkhorram
You hit it right on the head, stunt!

------
emersonrsantos
Doesn’t AWS compute optimizer does the same? What’s the difference?

~~~
kavehkhorram
Hi emersonrsantos,

Good question!

With Usage, every enterprise customer gets their own fine-tuned model. AWS
compute optimizer throws the same standardized model to all of their users. I
can't compare our models to the ones AWS compute optimizer uses - but I can
tell you that we've never had a complaint about a customer taking a
recommendation and regretting it later on.

Additionally, we have humans look over every recommendation to ensure quality.
Typically we have an understanding of a customer's cloud infrastructure before
they sign up for Usage - and the human in the loop uses that information to
grade recommendations produced by Usage's models.

------
stratified
[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/](https://aws.amazon.com/compute-optimizer/)

~~~
kavehkhorram
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.

------
jakozaur
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.

~~~
kavehkhorram
AFAIK, CloudHealth is mostly about cost management and analytics. Usage takes
it a step further and also shows recommendations.

I would be interested in hearing about your experience with cost optimization.
My email is kaveh@usage.ai if you'd like to reach out.

------
cr4zy
This is very much needed. I started to create something similar a few years
back in case it's helpful.
[https://github.com/crizCraig/benjamin/blob/master/benjamin.p...](https://github.com/crizCraig/benjamin/blob/master/benjamin.py)
Mostly it dealt with recommending reservations.

------
dave_sid
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.

~~~
kavehkhorram
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.

~~~
dave_sid
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.

~~~
kavehkhorram
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)

------
Thristle
as far as i can tell from the website this is mostly about converting
workflows to RIs. what about right sizing or underutilized instances? do you
need read permissions from cloudwatch to look at CPU/memory utilization or
just the cost and usage report?

I work at a company that started from cost optimization but now offers a
platform to manage the customers cloud operations and i only have 1 suggestion
- be very upfront about the permissions/data needed for Usage to do it's job.
you don't want to start a demo with a big/enterprise client only to find out
your permission needs are way beyond what is allowed in that company for
outside services

~~~
kavehkhorram
Hi Thristle,

We're more than just RIs. We also offer Savings Plans, Rightsizing, and Spot
Fleet management.

Our permissions include CPU, network, and memory logs. We can scale
permissions back on a customer-by-customer basis, though (as we have in the
past).

------
mindhash
Think this is a growing problem.

Related:

[https://segment.com/blog/the-10m-engineering-
problem/](https://segment.com/blog/the-10m-engineering-problem/)

------
throwaway09
Looks like the calculator needs a little tweaking!

[https://i.imgur.com/Lp8B62n.png](https://i.imgur.com/Lp8B62n.png)

~~~
kavehkhorram
Oops, thanks!

------
marketgod
Check out cloudchecker (spelled it wrong purposely, the 2nd e should be
removed) it may give you insight for pricing and features.

------
MdrnMdlCtzn
For enterprises (Fortune 500), Tangoe does this and integrates with your
accounts payable. Even does the payment processing.

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

~~~
lis
That’s not the experience I have with AWS. They are really trying to help you
get the most out of their platform - including costs.

I’m not saying their pricing is not confusing, but the account managers and
sales engineers I’ve worked with always did a good job navigating us through
it - and being honest when something can be achieved a lot cheaper.

Better have a customer optimize their usage, pay less, be happy, and stick
with AWS than switching to a different platform.

