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Comment by alien_ | Hacker News Reader

As a former contributor/co-maintainer and currently AWS employee I'm curious about your plans about the open source project behind the website.

Do you have any plans to change the licensing and/or contribution model? Are OpenSource contributions as welcomed as before?

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We don't have any plans to change the licensing or contribution model. Open source contributions are still welcome as before. We aim to maintain the ethos of the project as much as possible.

The Github repo will be moving over to our organization this week and our employees will be looking at bolstering support moving forward.

I'm happy to answer anything further directly if you'd like -- just email me: ben@vantage.sh

As a current AWS employee, doesn't the popularity of this site prove the customer's demand for an official version to exist?

And then since it doesn't exist, Isn't it safe to assume that AWS intentionally obscures pricing?

I think relatively few key people at AWS realize the level of popularity of this tool, but I know of multiple AWS employees who are big fans of it and a few have also contributed to it in the past.

AWS has been offering the APIs that the website uses currently as its main data source and also historically sponsored some of the hosting costs.

There's now also a similar table comparison view (although maybe not yet as convenient/comprehensive) available in the AWS console, but it's under active development and improving all the time. As far as I know the intent is to eventually have that view cover this use case. The AWS console team is eager to get feedback from customers to help improve it going forward.

A similar tool exists from AWS, the Instance Type (IIRC) inside the EC2 console.

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