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Show HN: Usage, Cut your AWS Bill by 50%+ in 5 Minutes
43 points by kavehkhorram on April 13, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 17 comments
Hi HN community, [Direct Link: www.usage.ai]

I’m Kaveh, founder and CEO of Usage, and am excited to show you Usage, an app that helps you slash your AWS EC2 bill by 50% in ~5min by trading reservations. As of today, Usage is in General Availability and any AWS user can use it. It works by creating a limited-access IAM role (ReadOnly + Ability to Manage Reservations) into your AWS account(s).

The AWS console interface has made it hard for companies to optimize their AWS spend. After years of working for different companies that use AWS, I still find it difficult to understand how much money I’m spending on AWS. I don’t know who owns what instances, how our commitments are saving us money (RIs, SPs, EDPs), and what instances can be sized down (or switched to spot).

At Usage, we are building a web-based app that keeps you in charge of your AWS while minimizing your bill. No code change, no moving your AWS account or instances around, and no downtime. We’ve built:

1) Real-Time RI/SP Recommendations: See which instances are uncovered by your SPs and/or RIs and get them covered with a single button tap. Instant savings.

2) RI Sell Recommendations: RIs that are no longer utilized are highlighted and sold instantly. No more worrying about unutilized RIs and no more needing to forecast your compute needs.

3) Consolidated View: View your EC2 instances and RI/SPs across all your AWS accounts in a single space. No more switching between AWS accounts.

4) Teams and Audit Log: Add as many users as you’d like to your Usage dashboard, and see who approved which recommendations.

We built Usage in ReactJS, Python, Java– and along the way we built our own internal accounting system to keep track of customer savings. We have plans to eventually release an open-source version of Usage.

Our business model is 20% of the savings we find you. We only make money when we save you money. We bill monthly and have longer-term enterprise plans available.

We take privacy extremely seriously. Your data is always protected both at-rest and in-transit. Additionally, Usage never collects or stores sensitive information. Usage only collects meta-data such as CPU utilization, launch time, instance configuration, region, etc. You can read our full privacy policy here: www.usage.ai/policy/

We are confident we can deliver a better AWS cost savings experience that is meaningfully better than other tools. If you use AWS, please give it a shot at www.usage.ai and let us know.

Let me know what you think! Ask me anything!



FYI, if you are struggling to find the link in the post like me:

https://usage.ai


Thanks!


1. for EC2: use spot + RI and you should be fine -- probably. we did this back in ~2016/17 and our aws billing went down significantly [1]

2. bandwidth: until your bandwidth hits certain threshold of the total billing, maybe look into az-aware architecture to save cross-az bandwidth cost.

3. leverage the pay-as-you-go service as much as you can.

4. learn the pricing model and architect well.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22410448


You'd think companies spend more time trying to optimize their spend but I've seen 6 figure changes from tools like this. Filed under "obvious in retrospect".


The title of your page should annoy the hell out of AWS !

"$10,264,760 saved on EC2" : I wouldn't be too happy if I were Jeff Bezos :D


Is jeff bezos still the CEO? i thought someone else took the rains, the former leader of the AWS team.


Andy Jassy.

And my understanding is that they're actually happy to save the customer money in the short-term, because that helps ensure that the customer will have more long-term loyalty.

That's why Amazon has the cost advisor type tools themselves, and why they partner with third parties that also do that sort of thing, etc....

Disclaimer: I work at AWS, but not in any part related to this software. My opinions are my own.


Hi Folks -- one important thing I should highlight about Usage is that it's more than just a RI recommender. All Usage RIs are backed by guaranteed buy-back so if you stop using an RI, Usage buys it back. This ends the need for customers to try and forecast their compute needs 3 years into the future.


To be fair, this is well covered with most enterprise scale Finops for CSP.


Cool, I'll give it a try. I dont think there is much gain to be had as we are mostly on spot & reserved instances already, but I'd gladly be suprised ;)


Curious to get your update on this, if you got surprised! :)


TL;DR: 0.2% theoretical savings. I was not suprised.

It came with the exact recommendation AWS gives, to replace one instance with a reserved instance & save about 240$ anually. And that instance happens to be a temporary one we needed to get rid off anyway.

So for me, it is not much better then the existing tooling offered by AWS when looking just at the savings. That being said, I do spend some time on checking the utilization & coverage of reservations every few months. This tool is so much more usable, gives immediate insight AND a 'buy now' button (approve).

Since it only takes me a few minutes every few months to go through all services we use, it ain't worth it for me. If you have a much larger organization and people spawning instances left and right and a highly variable load over longer periods, it could be nice I guess?

One big ommission in my view is that this tool does not look at RDS/ElastiCache/etc at all. This is where 40% of our running costs come from & 90% of our prepaid reservations are. Most of our EC2 spend is on spot instances, so nothing to be gained there anyway.

And with that, the value of this tool comes down to nearly zero in my case. It would save us about 0.2% if that instance had not been temporary. However, had it not been, we would already have a reservation for it anyway :)


Hi -- one thing I should mention (what makes us special) is that we offer all our RIs with guaranteed buy-back. So you're getting the 57% discount of a 3-year no-upfront RI, but have the option to sell it back to us anytime after 30 days. Guaranteed.

So you should actually buy the RI for the instance you plan on shutting off, and then we will buy it back when you shut the instance off.

Feel free to ping me directly if you'd like: kaveh@usage.ai


Thank you for the detailed feedback!

I created an account this morning but got no suggestions on my end... I don't know if I have to wait a few days or if what is done is done (ie: nothing).

We'll see.


If there are savings recommendations to be had, generally takes 2-4 minutes to generate. Can you email me the email you used to sign up so I can personally take a look at this for you?

kaveh@usage.ai


Will do, thanks!


Look interesting and perhaps this could save us from the surprised EC2 bills




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