AI · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to We built a product to help companies reduce AWS/GCP/Azure spend by 50%
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…
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Prices are shown for the 1 we have checked on their own sites, 1 of them free or with a free tier. We built a product to help companies reduce AWS/GCP/Azure spend by 50% launched in 2024; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
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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 →
- 4AB
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 · 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 →
- 6C5
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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Activepieces▲212We observed two main points in the AI automation industry that led us to these decisions: 1. *Compute is so much cheaper now compared to 15 years ago. Why are users still paying like it’s 2010?* So, we made tasks/runs unlimited on all our paid cloud plans. We still have an open-source, self-hosted version, but for cloud users, they will now pay for premium features and have the freedom to use them as much as they want. 1. *Building a good AI agent is a knowledge transfer task, so everyone should be able to build their own agents.* If every time I need to automate something or build an…
2023 · activepieces.com · its alternatives →
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Please check it out. I spent all of 2012 learning to code to launch what would eventually become Uncover. I'm super excited to announce that we're finally live. Here's a blog post I wrote on how we got there and a little story behind the startup: http://spencerfry.com/introducing-uncover
2013 · uncover.com · its alternatives →
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AI for Cloud management saving you up to 10% on AWS bills
2017 · squaredsd.com · its alternatives →
- 10IM
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 →
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Trails▲81Hey all, Justin here. I previously built Phind, the AI search engine for developers. One of the biggest problems we had there was figuring out what went wrong with bad searches. We had tons of searches per day, but less than 1% of users gave any explicit feedback. So we were either manually digging through searches or making general system improvements and hoping they helped. This problem gets harder with agents. Traces are longer and more complex. It takes more effort to review them, so I'm building a tool that lets you analyze LLM outputs directly to help developers of LLM apps and agents…
Jan 2026 · trails-red.vercel.app · its alternatives →
- 12IM
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 →
- 13UC
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 →
- 14WR
Hi HN, I previously wore SWE/SRE hats on GCP. Later, I was on the other side, managing thousands of machines. The friction points of onboarding and operating cloud systems are personal problems to me. I’ve found it hard to keep track of all the random cloud resources floating around, especially as my team’s assets proliferated. Occasionally, there is a resource affecting an outage but no one remembers where it is. I am constantly frustrated by existing tooling. APIs can work, after you’ve navigated the byzantine documentation, but I often find myself doing ad-hoc tasks which are best…
2022 · listvms.com · its alternatives →
- 15WU
hey y'all -- can you please tell us if our job search tool sucks? :D we built it using an investor platform called Harmonic.ai to gather startup data, then contextualize it so that job seekers could find out about the most exciting startups hiring first (like if they just raised, growing headcount fast, have an ex-unicorn founder, etc). pretty sure we're the first platform doing anything like this. anyway, let me know what you think. really excited to launch this thing soon! getting feedback from the hn community first is really fun :)
2022 · joinmaasive.com · its alternatives →
- 16CA
CAST AI (https://cast.ai) has built a cloud optimization platform that reduces AWS cloud costs 50% to 90%, optimizes DevOps, and automates disaster recovery via multi-cloud with a single cluster. Intelligent optimization engine delivers a cost-efficient, high-performing, and resilient infrastructure for every Kubernetes workload. If it sounds too good to be true - try free. To make it easier CAST AI provides AWS and GCP cloud credentials for free. Visit https://cast.ai Here's how it works: 1.Use CAST AI to deploy your K8s clusters. Next, take a look at the CAST AI…
2021 · its alternatives →
- 17NA
Hi HN! I built Nimbus, an AI agent that helps companies reduce their cloud costs by automatically analyzing their infrastructure and recommending specific optimization actions. What it does: - Continuously monitors AWS, GCP, and Azure resources - Sends daily actionable recommendations via email - Identifies underutilized dev/test VMs and over-provisioned - Kubernetes clusters - Estimates potential savings for each recommendation - Provides one-click approval for implementing changes - Tracks savings over time with detailed analytics Future Plans: - Support for DigitalOcean and Oracle…
2025 · its alternatives →
- 18
Hey HN! I'm Mike, based in Stockholm/Sweden and I'm the founder of Zero Waste Cloud (https://zerowastecloud.io) - a tool that scans AWS and GCP infrastructure to find cost optimization opportunities while calculating the environmental impact. Almost all businesses can save 20-40% of their cloud costs using this tool (sources at bottom) TLDR: Sign up -> Connect your AWS/GCP -> Scan -> Save 20-40% of your cloud spend. My backstory: I've been a CISO and in IT management for a long time and always been frustrated by how much waste I'd find in every environment - idle EC2…
2025 · zerowastecloud.io · its alternatives →
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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 →
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Hi HN. I'm the founder of Phoenix Labs (ex TikTok, Applied AI) and we're open sourcing our internal tooling today which is like a toolchain / meta-harness for CLI agents useful for really scaling eng and creative work. We are a very small team who's building a very ambitious product so we had to find ways to squeeze every ounce of efficiency that we could get our hands on. Harness strengths of different models (Claude, GPTs) and CLI-harnesses (Claude Code, Codex), safe/robust browser integration to speed up UX/QA testing, teams cli to speed up security reviews and parallelize…
May 2026 · agents-cli.sh · its alternatives →
- 22CW
Hello HN, Lucas here. I’ve been working with BigQuery for ~5 years, mostly in large (petabyte-scale) environments. Over time we ended up spending a lot of money and engineering effort just trying to understand where costs were coming from, why and how to optimize them. At some point we decided to stop, leverage all our past experience and spend a full cycle building tooling focused on cost visibility and optimization. The main goal was to regain ownership of cost data and make it possible to understand our cost structure in under a minute, while aligning the views of engineering and FinOps…
Jan 2026 · cloudclerk.ai · its alternatives →
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- 24SA
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 →
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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 →