Cost.dev (YC W21) – making agents cost-aware and cheaper to call
We launched Infracost on HN five years ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26064588) where our CLI generated cost estimates for infra-as-code, e.g. "this Terraform PR adds $400/mo". The idea was to shift cloud costs (FinOps) left, so engineers get visibility of costs before deployment and make better decisions. Earlier this year we started seeing agent traffic in our logs and it looked like coding agents were calling our CLI. But that CLI wasn't designed with coding agents in mind. We went down a philosophical rabbit hole to see if a CLI is even needed anymore given…
Cost.dev (YC W21) – making agents cost-aware and cheaper to call launched on June 4, 2026 with 48 votes, #670 of 22,647 launches that month and more than 95% of that year's launches.
In plain words
Cost.dev provides infrastructure cost estimation tools optimized for AI coding agents. It helps agents like Claude and Copilot understand cloud infrastructure expenses during code generation, reducing their output token usage by up to 79% and API costs by up to 67%. The tool enables developers and agents to make cost-aware infrastructure decisions before deployment, extending cost visibility practices from human engineers to AI systems.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
Install in minutes and eliminate cloud waste from your IaC configurations — before you go to PR review.
In the maker’s words, at launch
We launched Infracost on HN five years ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26064588) where our CLI generated cost estimates for infra-as-code, e.g. "this Terraform PR adds $400/mo". The idea was to shift cloud costs (FinOps) left, so engineers get visibility of costs before deployment and…
Does a similar job
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Infracost (YC W21) – Open-source cloud cost policies2022 · github.com · ▲121Hi, we’re Ali, Hassan and Alistair, co-founders of Infracost (https://www.infracost.io/). Infracost shows engineers the cost of each Terraform change in CI/CD before resources are launched. When something changes, it posts a comment with the cloud cost impact. e.g. you’ve added 2 instances and volumes, and have changed an instance type from medium to large, this will increase your bill by 25% next month from $1000 to $1250 per month. We launched the first version of Infracost just under a year ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26064588). As we said…
- STSee the impact on your cloud costs as you code2024 · ▲179
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…
- IYInfracost (YC W21): Be proactive with your cloud costs2023 · ▲86
Hi, we are Ali, Hassan, and Alistair, co-founders of Infracost (https://www.infracost.io/). Infracost helps engineers see the cost of each Terraform change before launching resources. When changes are made, it posts a comment with the cloud cost impact. For example, “you’ve added 2 instances and volumes, and change an instance type from medium to large, your bill will increase by 25% next month, from $1000 to $1250 per month”. We launched in February 2021 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26064588), and Infracost is now being actively used by over 3,000…
Infracost VSCode Extension2022 · github.com · ▲78See cost estimates for Terraform right in your editor
See the carbon impact of your cloud as you codeJan 2026 · dashboard.infracost.io · ▲67Hey 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.…
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