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 and reservations rather than focusing on business problems.

In the early days, we saw horror stories of customers with millions of dollars in monthly on-demand spend simply because their finance team didn't want them committing to AWS. Worst yet, we've seen AWS users who ended up overspending by hundreds of thousands of dollars a month because they overcommitted their Savings Plan commitment.

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 on a call. On average, we reduce AWS EC2 spend by 50% for 5 minutes of work, and RDS spend by ~30%.

To reduce by 50%+, we don't touch the instances, require any code change, or change the performance of your instances. We buy Reserved Instances on your behalf (a billing layer change only) and bundle them with guaranteed buyback. So you get the steep 57% savings of 3-year no-upfront RIs with none of the commitment.

We make money off of a 20% Savings Fee. Happy to chat directly kaveh@usage.ai

Have you experienced any issues with managing your company or organization's AWS expenses? We'd love to hear your feedback and ideas!