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Comment by acdha | Hacker News Reader

> We buy Reserved Instances on your behalf (a billing layer change only) and bundle them with guaranteed buyback

This is by setting your AWS account as the payer account so you can aggregate? I’m curious how the finances will work out - at least one of them had challenges balancing their RIs with customer changes since there wasn’t a feedback cue for developers not to change instance types casually.

On a marketing level, I have an instinctive negative reaction to the claims like the title here has because I know it’s not true for me (my accounts are dominated by storage and network egress so even if EC2 were free you couldn’t get 57%). I’m wondering how best to phrase it to help people understand they can save a lot but not make it seem like you’re misrepresenting the possibilities. It’d also be useful to compare with compute savings plans.

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This is mainly in reference to the fact that Reserved Instances don't have any bearing on the instances themselves (ie. no code change, performance chance, server downtime, etc.).

The 57% savings is the difference between the 3-year, no-upfront, standard Reserved Instance rate and the On-demand rate (for RDS it is 30% vs on-demand)

As far as compute savings plans:

1-yr SP is anywhere from 26-29% savings vs on-demand

3-year Sp is anywhere from 49-52% savings vs on-demand

... but note that these commitments are non-transferrable. Customers find our tailorable commitments to be a healthy blend of savings + safety against over-committing to volume they may not need

If you take 20% of the savings, my max savings are ~45%. Even that assumes my AWS bill is entirely instances.

I think you have a product that some companies will really want. It’s a good product; don’t let your marketing promises exceed the true savings by so much that it makes people leery of what else you might be hiding or stating in a less than straightforward manner.

I'm a huge user of RIs, I like the idea of tools to balance them more easily, etc. Totally on board with that but the way the number is presented seems to me like you're setting yourself up to over-promise and under-deliver, not to mention turning off people who are familiar enough with this to already be using RIs / CSPs somewhat. Simply qualifying it to “Cut AWS EC2 spend by up to 57%” would avoid some of that, and you could probably address the latter users with some hard data about flexibility or total net savings by other customers so people could get an idea of what it looks like for normal users who aren't just buying acres of EC2 instances and nothing else.

It just depends on what you have. I did get 20% right off the bat with RDS just buying no-upfront RIs. I could have probably gotten around 30% if I did upfront and longer commitment.

Same here. If you shaved of 100% of all the EC2 instance costs off of our 40K/month AWS bill we would save -> nothing. We are not running a single EC2 instance.

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