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Seems like a clone of https://www.usage.ai which has been on the frontpage a few times recently, but just undercutting the finders fee - I guess that's the "other providers that charge you egregious fees"

There are a number of providers in this space. You're correct that for this specific feature, the main difference is the cost to the customer. Usage publicly states that they charge 20% of the savings found. We've heard that other providers have charged up to 30% of the savings found which seems predatory in nature.

Vantage is trying to more philosophically align with the customer and provide the lowest cost possible at 5% of the savings found. These are ultimately your savings and you should have as much of them as possible.

Lastly, this is just one feature we provide in addition to the other cost visibility features listed at https://vantage.sh/ under the "features" tab. Vantage also has cost visibility support for GCP, Fastly and other providers of Azure, Snowflake and Datadog on the way.

This is really cool!

If you do what you say you do, this is a lot of value to be had relative to the costs.

We're coming to the end of our cloud credits and I was thinking about next steps - definitely giving this a shot.

This looks very interesting!

Given that you're purchasing 3-year RIs and then selling them on the marketplace, do you have stats on the risk of a listing not being purchased by someone for an extended period of time, and that eating into the potential savings?

> This is saving early customers over 50% in some cases

Does this 50% number account for the risk of unused RIs sitting unsold in the marketplace?

I saw in your docs that you're pursuing SOC2 compliance in 2022. Any updates on the timeline?

Do you take into account existing Savings Plan purchases and existing RIs that the account already has?

Developer advocate at Vantage here. Let me take your questions:

1. Do we have stats on liquidity in the RI marketplace (paraphrasing). Yes we do! We know that some instance types are more liquid than others and factor that into the Autopilot algorithm.

2. Does 50% account for risks? It does. We profile peaks and valleys in usage on a per compute class basis and always ensure that our RI coverage is optimally covering those peaks and valleys without running the risk of over-commitment. If there is a significant delta between peak and valley, we may make a lower RI commitment for that compute class to decrease risk. The specific coverage and savings rates are ultimately dependent on the usage by compute class which is different for each customer.

3. SOC2 timeline? We're expecting this before the end of the year.

4. Take into account existing RIs and SPs? Yes we do. The Autopilot dashboard will show you how much coverage you already have. And then here's a specific docs link with more details on this https://docs.vantage.sh/autopilot/#i-have-existing-aws-savin...

Thank you for the detailed responses!

Since reserved instances are shared across AWS organizations:

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/awsaccountbilling/latest/aboutv2...

Does this work across AWS organizations? Or currently targeting individual AWS accounts?

How is this allowed by AWS? This feels very counter intuitive to Bezo's mantra, 'your margin is my opportunity.'

Ultimately we are just leveraging the primitives provided by AWS to make this happen. Reserved Instances and Savings Plans help AWS (which is why they offer a discount for them) as they're able to more effectively forecast and negotiate bulk purchases with their upstream vendors. If anything, on-demand usage is just charging a higher premium because of the ambiguity of when you may stop using it at a moment's notice.

Because for everyone that does care to fine tune these things, there are plenty of people that still oversubscribe massively and pay way more than they have to.

And this is just using all the existing billing info AWS already has.

To some extent, AWS's introduction of Savings Plan (just before 2019 re:Invent) did significantly eat into the margin available in this space. Prior to Savings Plan, Reserved Instances purchase advising was much more lucrative (IMO). Once Savings Plan was introduced, that became a pretty great low-cognitive-effort default and could be supplemented by direct RI purchases where you either needed to reserve capacity (not that common) or where you had a fairly steady workload and could buy RIs to cover that and SP to cover most of the balance.

For us, that turned this process from something that was large part black magic, spreadsheets, and guesswork into something that could be done 85+% well on half a napkin.

I don't think AWS has ever been low-margin and the pricing even looks deliberately complexified in some cases, like it was designed by some kind of quant.

I signed up, it told me I had to upgrade to Pro, and there was a 14 day trial. I signed up for the trial, provided my CC, and it still charged me $30. Not a huge deal, but can you please fix whatever bug is causing that?

It can leave a bad taste.

Can you please email support [at] vantage [dot] sh? We'll see what could have happened here and will definitely refund. Typically this should only happen if you click "activate" on the free trial flow.

Is there a difference between your service and SpotInst aka Spot.io? Do you claim to have a better algorithm? It would be interesting to load the same app with both companies and see how the spend differs

I believe Autopilot is competitive with Spot's "Eco" product.

From what we've heard, Spot by NetApp charges somewhere between 20% and 30% of the savings found. Vantage Autopilot charges 5% of the savings found.

We ultimately can't comment on their algorithms or effectiveness of Eco but the difference in these fees for what should be comparable savings found by both seems extreme. At Vantage, we try to philosophically align with the customer and pass on the highest amount of savings possible. Other providers seem to be doing the opposite.

You could also try CAST AI - savings report is free so you don't need to sign any contract to see how much you could save. For some users ie we've saved 90% - $124k/mo cloud cost. Feel free to play around https://cast.ai/

Interesting project! As for the market, do you guarantee a buyer? Also, what's the difference between Vantage selling our overprovisioned RIs vs us listing it to the marketplace directly?

10~30% discount off AWS bill can be negotiated once you reach a certain billing threshold by reaching out to AWS support.

Sure, but you can still leverage an EDP, and use savings plans/RIS to save even more money.

I commit to 3 year flexible savings plans at about 60% of hourly peaks(change instance types) and top up to peak usage patterns - EDP is not a replacement for optimising cost per hour. The more you can pay AWS upfront, the more you'll save - (depends on your business's ability to do so)

That's interesting. Where can I find more info on this?

Sweet - so how does this actually work?

We wrote up some documentation on this and I'm linked directly to the "How Does Autopilot work?" section for you: https://docs.vantage.sh/autopilot/#how-does-autopilot-work

Noticed all these recommended permissions in that doc page:

               "ec2:PurchaseReservedInstancesOffering",
               "rds:PurchaseReservedDBInstancesOffering",
               "elasticache:PurchaseReservedCacheNodesOffering",
               "es:PurchaseReservedInstanceOffering",
               "redshift:PurchaseReservedNodeOffering",

Curious about plans for those services other than EC2 given that they don't currently seem to have Reserved Instance Marketplaces

Also curious about any plans for other services with general reservations like CloudFront

2022: instead of changing provider there are entire companies to lower spent on a determinated provider

What is the reserved instance marketplace? Is it something created by Vantage?

Nope - it's something created by AWS: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ri-marke...

Wow that’s very interesting. It has a “bond market” vibe though I can’t pinpoint the exact analogy. Do you know of if there are any strategies that would somehow “beat the market”?

Nothing beats architectural changes to your application to reduce costs.

Not really; if Vantage works as advertised it's basically free money and it should be multiplicative with any savings due to app changes.

Can someone do this for GCP?

Developer advocate at Vantage here. Using their committed use discount mechanism is definitely on our radar. We just rolled out Google Cloud support earlier this year https://www.vantage.sh/blog/vantage-launches-google-cloud-su...

is there a possibility of server downtime using this service?

Nope! We don't touch your infrastructure at all for this. Autopilot only is managing financial commitments on your behalf. Reserved Instances (and Savings Plans) sit alongside your infrastructure but do not touch it and there is no chance of this impacting your workloads.

Additionally, all of our IAM permissions are read-only with only the exceptions being managing the reserved instances themselves. You can view the permissions to validate this upon signing up.

seems great. what are the risks?

An off by one error by vantage makes your company purchase hundreds of not needed 3 year commitments

If it misbehaves and buys too many / the wrong kind of RIs, you will be locked in to a high monthly AWS bill until you can sell the RIs on the AWS RI marketplace, which has a whole bunch of caveats: https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/purchasing-options/reserved-insta...

The honest answer is that there is a risk of being over-committed with reserved instances and savings plans regardless of whether you purchase them yourselves or rely on something like Autopilot to do it. We target RIs specifically because you can sell out of them on the AWS EC2 RI Marketplace which isn't the case with AWS Savings Plans.

Ultimately, cost savings are our business and what our entire team focuses on all day every day. Most everyone on our team has also either worked at AWS or another public cloud provider and knows this stuff inside and out.

While Autopilot looks to maximize savings, it always errs on the side of not overcommitting you. We haven't had a single incident here and have taken both technical and operational steps to ensure this doesn't happen.

It could purchase numerous RI's and then find there's no market for selling them.

This seems like something you could build over a weekend. I'm excited to see an open source alternative for this.

EDIT: Folks, if you're truly large enough to benefit from vantage, please talk to your AWS/GCP/Azure rep and work with them on deciding what you should do for committed usage. There are a lot of ways to save money on cloud costs, and they all start with a conversation with your cloud provider. If you don't have enough spend to have a cloud provider rep, vantage isn't going to save you that much money.

> This seems like something you could build over a weekend

We look forward to seeing your "Show HN" with a competing product next Tuesday. Good luck.

If you enjoy problems like this, we're hiring engineers ;)

https://www.vantage.sh/careers/

"This seems like something you could build over a weekend"

Donno why but this comment reminds of the infamous Dropbox comment :).

Well that comment claimed you don't even need to develop anything... This one at least recognizes there's work to be done. :-D

the value of what Vantage is building is not by solving a technical challenge, it's by solving a marketplace/network effects problem (something that is much harder to do)

> This seems like something you could build over a weekend

I think you've succinctly illustrated why software estimation is notoriously unreliable.

Those estimating do not yet understand the problem.

I also think it’s showing extreme naïveté when it comes to the fallacies of “myths programmers have about X” where X in this case is billing. Billing and money is hard not because of the technical aspects of moving 1s and 0s correctly but because it’s a socially mediated system with a lot of messy things that tend to require humans.

> This seems like something you could build over a weekend

You're now at the risk of beclowning yourself if you don't post your own self-built alternative in 48 hrs! I'll be sure to come back and check ;)

Show HN: Vantage Autopilot – Save on AWS EC2 Costs