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Life & fun · August 9, 2023

IY

Infracost (YC W21): Be proactive with your cloud costs

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 (YC W21): Be proactive with your cloud costs launched on August 9, 2023 with 86 votes, #1,232 of 4,347 launches that month and more than 90% of that year's launches.

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In plain words

Infracost is a tool that shows engineers the cloud cost impact of their Terraform infrastructure changes before deploying them. It automatically posts comments in pull requests detailing how proposed changes will affect monthly cloud bills, such as cost increases from adding resources or changing instance types. The software is designed for engineering teams and FinOps teams managing cloud infrastructure costs on platforms like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.

written from the facts on this page · September 2026

From the sources

In the maker’s words, at launch

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…

Does a similar job

all alternatives →
  • Infracost (YC W21) – Open-source cloud cost policies2022 · github.com · ▲121

    Hi, 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…

  • See the carbon impact of your cloud as you codeJan 2026 · dashboard.infracost.io · ▲67

    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.…

  • Infracost2021 · infracost.io · ▲101

    Open source cloud cost estimator in pull requests

  • ST
    See 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…

  • Infracost VSCode Extension2022 · github.com · ▲78

    See cost estimates for Terraform right in your editor

  • Cost.dev (YC W21) – making agents cost-aware and cheaper to callJun 2026 · cost.dev · ▲48

    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…

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