Alternatives
Products that do what Unitcause does
Ending the ‘Microservices Tax’ with Causal Unit Economics.
- 1
- 2
- 3IB
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
- 4U2
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
- 5ST
Hey folks, my name is Owen and I recently started working at a startup (https://infracost.io/) that shows engineers how much their code changes are going to cost on the cloud before being deployed (in CI/CD like GitHub or GitLab). Previously, I was one of the founders of tfsec (it scanned code for security issues). One of the things I learnt was if we catch issues early, i.e. when the engineer was typing their code, we save a bunch of time. I was thinking … okay, why not build cloud costs into the code editor. Show the cloud cost impact of the code as the engineers are…
2024
- 6
- 7IB
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
- 8ST
Hey folks, I’m Hassan, one of the co-founders of Infracost (https://www.infracost.io). Infracost helps engineers see and reduce the cloud cost of each infrastructure change before they merge their code. The way Infracost works is we gather pricing data from Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. What we call a ‘Pricing Service’, which now holds around 9 million live price points (!!). Then we map these prices to infrastructure code. Once the mapping is done, it enables us to show the cost impact of a code change before it is merged, directly in GitHub, GitLab etc.…
Jan 2026 · dashboard.infracost.io
- 9CY
Hello HN community! Sri and Brian here from CloudPal (https://www.cloudpal.io/). We are building a tool to help companies reduce their cloud costs by stopping non-production resources when they’re not needed. The problem: Almost every company on the cloud struggles with cost management. While optimizing production costs can be complex, reducing non-production costs should be a straightforward case of shutting down resources when they’re not in use. However, most companies lack an elegant solution for this. The solution: CloudPal - A downtime scheduler for non-production…
2022
- 10IB
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
- 11MT
2019 · github.com
- 12AU
I run 3mins.news (https://3mins.news), an AI news aggregator built entirely on Cloudflare Workers. The backend has 10+ cron triggers running every few minutes: RSS fetching, article clustering, LLM calls, email delivery. The problem: Workers Paid Plan has hard monthly limits (10M requests, 1M KV writes, 1M queue ops, etc.). There's no built-in "pause when you hit the limit", CF just starts billing overages. KV writes cost $5/M over the cap, so a retry loop bug can get expensive fast. AWS has Budget Alerts, but those are passive notifications, by the time you read the email,…
Mar 2026
- 13
I wanted to share a project I’ve been working on called Frugal Tokens. I originally built it because I was curious to see how much all of my sessions cost and how much cache misses affected that spend. I’d noticed people had widely different spend profiles and wanted to better understand what might contribute to that. As I’ve worked on this, the tool has grown to show more usage patterns across all of your sessions. It shows overall usage, estimated working time and overlapping sessions, and where your spend is coming from across models and cache misses. I also have a few session level…
19d ago · demo.frugaltokens.com
- 14AB
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…
2022
- 15WB
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
- 16LC
Hi HN, I'm building Librarian (https://uselibrarian.dev/), an open-source (MIT) context management tool that stops AI agents from burning tokens by blindly re-reading their entire conversation history on every turn. The Problem: If you're building agentic loops in frameworks like LangGraph or OpenClaw, you hit two walls fast: Financial Cost: Token usage scales quadratically over long conversations. Passing the whole history every time gets incredibly expensive. Context Rot: As the context window fills up, the LLM suffers from the "Lost in the Middle" effect. Response latency…
Feb 2026 · uselibrarian.dev
- 17C5
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
- 18WV
If you’re in DevOps, SRE or software engineering in general you’ll love this. You can now both monitor your Kubernetes costs and get cost reduction insights completely FREE with CAST AI. We’ve just officially opened cost monitoring feature up to the public at CAST AI and it’s got no limits to the number of clusters you can connect or historical data you can access. Check it out here: https://cast.ai/cloud-cost-monitoring/ CAST AI’s cost monitoring features: - Free analysis for all your clusters, with no limits on their number or sizes. - Near-instant results as…
2022 · cast.ai
- 19NO
Morning HN - - I have a quick story about building a startup and misreading the market, and an ask. (The ask: Try out our product>> https://app.datable.io/auth/sandbox) My name is Julian Giuca and I was an early employee at New Relic, where I led their Logging product until 2022. It’s safe to say I have opinions about logs. Sometimes I think they are great. Too often I think we can do much better. When people talk to me about logs, they reliably complain about observability costs. Engineering leaders have said it feels “like a protection racket”, where you're forced to…
2025
- 20SA
I have built a simple service to generates charts on usage and costs for a SaaS service. While companies have raised millions, I have given up a top paying consulting gig to build the service. I need testers to help me stabilize and scale the service. website : www.xervmon.com
2012
- 21OC
Hi HN, My name is Ben Schaechter and I’m Co-Founder and CEO of https://vantage.sh - a cloud cost visibility and optimization platform. We just added support for monitoring OpenAI costs and usage to Vantage and I wanted to share a demo we put together with HN as I thought people might find it interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzAOU1-uMrM In early April we started getting requests from customers to add OpenAI cost support specifically as it was a bit opaque as to what exactly was driving costs. The way this works is that it uses an undocumented API available…
2023
- 22ID
2021 · github.com
- 23
- 24SN
Hi HN, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MN7RNVo9nc4 (The text below is based upon the linked video above) I'm Co-Founder & CEO of Vantage: a cloud cost observability platform. Our team put together a quick video showing a new feature we launched that I think this community may be interested in: Network Flow Reports. This gives you the ability to see flows normalized by cost instead of usage for AWS resources. Knowing that AWS has different rates depending on the source and destination of network traffic, we did the work of ingesting VPC Flow Logs and cross-referencing with the…
2024
Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Refine with a description →