Usage, Cut your AWS Bill by 50%+ in 5 Minutes
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…
In plain words
Usage is a web application that helps AWS users reduce their EC2 costs by optimizing reservation management. It connects to AWS accounts through a limited-access IAM role and provides visibility into spending, instance ownership, and cost-saving opportunities like reserved instances and spot instances. The tool is designed for companies struggling to understand and optimize their AWS expenses without requiring code changes or infrastructure modifications.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
In the maker’s words, at launch
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 I’m spending on AWS. I don’t know who owns what instances, how our commitments are saving us money (RIs, SPs, EDPs), and what instances can be sized down (or switched to spot). At Usage, we are building a web-based app that keeps you in charge of your AWS while minimizing your bill. No code change, no moving your AWS account or instances around, and no downtime. We’ve built: 1) Real-Time RI/SP Recommendations: See which instances are uncovered by your SPs and/or RIs and get them covered with a single button tap. Instant savings. 2) RI Sell Recommendations: RIs that are no longer utilized are highlighted and sold instantly. No more worrying about unutilized RIs and no more needing to forecast your compute needs. 3) Consolidated View: View your EC2 instances and RI/SPs across all your AWS accounts in a single space. No more switching between AWS accounts. 4) Teams and Audit Log: Add as many users as you’d like to your Usage dashboard, and see who approved which recommendations. We built Usage in ReactJS, Python, Java– and along the way we built our own internal accounting system to keep track of customer savings. We have plans to eventually release an open-source version of Usage. Our business model is 20% of the savings we find you. We only make money when we save you money. We bill monthly and have longer-term enterprise plans available. We take privacy extremely seriously. Your data is always protected both at-rest and in-transit. Additionally, Usage never collects or stores sensitive information. Usage only collects meta-data such as CPU utilization, launch time, instance configuration, region, etc. You can read our full privacy policy here: www.usage.ai/policy/ We are confident we can deliver a better AWS cost savings experience that is meaningfully better than other tools. If you use AWS, please give it a shot at www.usage.ai and let us know. Let me know what you think! Ask me anything!
Does a similar job
all alternatives →- U2Usage 2.0 – Cut AWS Spend by 57% in 5 Minutes2023 · ▲135
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…
- IBI built a service to help companies save on their AWS bills2020 · ▲73
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…
- IBI built a service to help companies reduce AWS spend by 50%2022 · usage.ai · ▲123
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,…
- IBI built a service to help companies save 35%+ on their AWS bills2020 · ▲25
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/
- C5Cut 50%+ on the Cloud (AWS / GCP / Azure)2024 · ▲12
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…
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