AI · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to A Better Alternative to the AWS Console
Hey HN: Kaveh here, the founder of https://www.usage.ai/ We launched a new free tool to help engineers understand their AWS spend. Why? Because the way it's done now is a pain. DevOps and Software Engineers end up end up becoming cloud accountants or end up forking over a big % of their AWS bill for a tool to understand costs rather than focusing on business problems. 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 this new tool works: It's fully self-serve and…
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. A Better Alternative to the AWS Console launched in 2022; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
- 1
Hey HN: Kaveh here, the founder of https://www.usage.ai/ We help companies drive down AWS EC2 spend. Why? Because the way it's done now is a pain. DevOps and Software Engineers end up spending time managing costs rather than focusing on business problems. 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 brought in by a DevOps manager to cut AWS EC2 costs. The app is entirely self-service and the savings are generated automatically,…
2022 · usage.ai · its alternatives →
- 2IB
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…
2020 · its alternatives →
- 3U2
Hey HN: Kaveh here, the founder of https://www.usage.ai/ We launched on Hacker News for the first time early last year, and we've made a lot of progress since then. We've saved tens of millions of dollars for companies, and we are even more excited to announce the launch of a new product: insured reservations for RDS! We worked closely with AWS on this feature and are excited to finally make it generally available. We help companies drive down AWS EC2 & RDS spend. Why? Because the way it's done now is a pain. DevOps and Software Engineers end up spending time managing costs…
2023 · its alternatives →
- 4WB
Hey HN: Kaveh here, founder of https://www.usage.ai/ We help companies drive down AWS, GCP, and Azure spend. Why? Because the way it's done now is a pain. DevOps and Software Engineers end up spending time managing costs rather than focusing on business problems. I have been building Usage AI for almost 4 years now (4 year anniversary in 1 month from now!) with an incredible group of founding people. We started as a product just to help lower AWS EC2 costs, and now we do all major AWS services (such as RDS, OpenSearch, ElastiCache, and Redshift with more on the way) and other…
2024 · its alternatives →
- 5IB
Hi everyone, I've been working on a side project over quarantine called Usage.ai and I finally feel comfortable enough to launch it. We're a service that plugs directly into AWS, automatically finds savings, and applies those savings at the press of a confirmation button all without ever needing to go to an AWS console. I'd love to get HN's thoughts on it! Demo: https://www.loom.com/share/2a6f1c8e4c214914a1cdd88c6fdec4ac Link: https://www.usage.ai/
2020 · its alternatives →
- 6AS
We provide financial planning and analysis for enterprise infrastructure to help you understand, negotiate, and optimize your cloud spend.
2020 · duckbillgroup.com · its alternatives →
- 7UC
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…
2022 · its alternatives →
- 8
Cloud spend visibility tool Finally Get Clarity On Cloud Spend Without Hours Lost In Dashboards
2018 · cloudforecast.io · its alternatives →
- 9IW
Hi HN! During the last few years, I worked on a few applications built with Go, running on AWS Lambda. As I got to know the platform better, I started to find Go & Lambda to be a really productive combination. The applications were fast, and they ended up being much cheaper to run than what my team & I had built before. It’s probably not the best platform for _every_ application, but I was surprised at how much of our workload worked well on it. As we brought new engineers on to our team and helped them get up to speed with the stack, I found that we were covering a lot of the same topics…
2021 · its alternatives →
- 10
Infrabase▲142We too at first thought that letting an LLM manage your AWS account must be a bad idea. What could possibly go wrong?? However we couldn’t resist building it, and when we did, we were surprised how much it can do even in plain vanilla form, which currently is just the ai-sdk frontend with some aws sdk code generation (inspared by aws-mcp). We all but stopped using the AWS console internally and switched to Infrabase - a lot of the time it’s much faster to prompt than to click around in AWS console, especially for things that involve multiple steps, IAM roles, etc. So we started to think of…
2025 · infrabase.co · its alternatives →
- 11
- 12CS
Hello HN! Daniele, Ilia, and Thomas here to share Cloudthread’s new Cost Savings Hub to help companies surface and eliminate cloud waste. We’re putting our money where our mouth is: for the next two weeks, find over $500 in monthly AWS savings with Cloudthread’s Savings Hub or we’ll give you a $100 Amazon Gift Card. More context: https://www.cloudthread.io/aws-save-or-get-paid Most cloud infrastructure managers know there’s waste in their cloud environment but it’s challenging and time consuming to 1) surface all the waste, 2) convert those opportunities into actualized…
2023 · cloudthread.io · its alternatives →
- 13IM
Hey HN: Kaveh here, the founder of https://www.usage.ai/ We help companies drive down AWS EC2 spend by buying and selling 3-year no-upfront reserved instances. Why? Because there's almost no liquidity on the AWS EC2 RI Marketplace and it can take a while, if at all, to sell an RI if you need to stop using one. Previous to founding Usage, I worked at JPMorgan Chase as a summer analyst. Here's how it works: We are typically brought in by a DevOps manager to cut AWS EC2 costs. The app is entirely self-service and the savings are generated automatically, typically we do this live…
2023 · its alternatives →
- 14
Check out my self-hosted cloud! A DIY alternative to AWS, built with second-hand hardware and open-source tools, fueled by passion. Take a look:
2024 · diy-cloud.remikeat.com · its alternatives →
- 15SA
Hi HN, I built SubTrack to help teams find unused SaaS tools and cloud resources before they silently eat into budgets. The motivation came from seeing how hard it is to answer simple questions: – Which SaaS tools are actually used? – Which cloud resources are idle? – What will our end-of-month spend look like? SubTrack connects to tools like AWS, GitHub, Vercel, and others to surface unused resources and cost signals from one place. Recently I added multi-account support, currency localization, and optional AI-based insights to help interpret usage patterns. This is an early-stage project…
Jan 2026 · subtrack.pulseguard.in · its alternatives →
- 16IM
I'm normal contractor programmer, for the past few years doing mainly DevOps on AWS. I noticed lot of smaller companies don't have enough work for full-time devops person nor they have cloud/aws knowledge on the team. Lot of them has similar needs. So my thinking is I can help them for flat montly fee to do all the infrastructure on AWS for them. Obviously this is no way to get rich but my hope is to streamline my process and avoid chasing invoices etc. What do you think?
2024 · stunningdevops.com · its alternatives →
- 17
I use multiple AI tools for work and also my side projects, and the annoying part was to track my costs and token usage across tools. Everytime I had to visit each tool and its respective usage setting to check it and I was losing patience and also was getting hit by surprise limits Now I know that there are already free/open-source trackers for Cursor or Claude usage, and they are useful if that is all you need. My problem is broader as I wanted one small place to see tokens, spend, subscriptions and limits across the AI tools I actually use. I was really tired of switching tabs and…
Jul 2026 · lifehacksgermany.com · its alternatives →
- 18
I built Bill My Cloud because I wanted a faster way to estimate AWS costs during early planning, without navigating the confusing official calculator or recording on spreadsheets. This started as a simple calculator, but I’ve been expanding it based on real usage needs and AWS services. What it does - Estimate AWS costs with minimal inputs and sensible defaults - Instant PDF export of the estimate (useful for sharing or approvals) - Suggestions for cheaper configurations or cost-saving changes - Shareable config links so others can view the same setup - Optional cloud save for configurations…
Dec 2025 · billmycloud.org · its alternatives →
- 19
This open-source project helps you save money in ways other than RIs or Savings Plans. It inspects AWS metrics and usage data to find underutilized and unused resources, then visually gives an option to delete, scale down, or optimize those resources. For each resource, it displays the relevant metrics so you can determine whether or not it's truly unused/underused/ It also includes opportunities to save money on different services by enabling native cost savings policies, like S3 retention policies. It runs totally on your computer as an open source project and doesn't send…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 20
Stop wasting 40% of your AWS spend — in minutes
Oct 2025 · awscostguard.com · its alternatives →
- 21
- 22OS
I got tired of collecting open source projects in my chrome bookmarks so I decided to compile a curated list of: - Recently active projects on GitHub - Mostly dev tools (but also productivity, analytics) - Projects which are "Alternative to X software" My bookmarks are finally empty:D If you have a great open source tool you use, I'd be glad to hear your suggestions. Also, any feedback is greatly appreciated.
2025 · alternativeoss.com · its alternatives →
- 23IM
2022 · paylesstoaws.com · its alternatives →
- 24C5
Hi HN community! My name is Kane and I'm on the product team at www.usage.ai , a cloud cost optimization company. After honing our product on AWS, I'm excited to announce our availability for customers on GCP and Azure! At a high level, Usage insures committed use-discounts (CUDs) to reduce commitment risk and enable higher savings for companies on the cloud. With traditional CUDs, you commit to a certain level of usage over a specified period in exchange for discounted rates from the cloud provider. However, if your actual usage falls short of the committed amount, you may not fully realize…
2024 · its alternatives →
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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →