Show HN: See the impact on your cloud costs as you code

I have more macro questions about this. Sometimes I find engineers aren’t best placed to evaluate cost at all. What might be perceived as expensive (say relative to a salary) is not expensive at all in the context of the business problem being solved.

Think there’s a book called “measure what matters” and the idea is what we measure shapes companies and behaviour. So I’d be very careful about implementing anything like this in my org.

The main page doesn't mention Terraform explicitly (except for the user feedback section). Are there plans to make this compatible with e.g. AWS CDK or Pulumi?

Good idea mate. This is the kind of thing that should have heaps of users.

I wanted to watch the YouTube video but I didn’t have access to audio, and gave up. Video took to long and had too few visual cues - I think many people will do the same.

So you should make a super short gif (10-20 seconds max) that gets the point across extremely fast and visually - no audio.

Post it on Reddit on webdev, you’ll get a shit tonne of people installing this.

I’ve had lots of success with this simple method (sold a personal project with 700,000 users)

This seems to be solving a problem that most enterprise software engineers don't have. If you're at a large company that has already chosen its preferred cloud, you're probably already spending $xxM+ with them annually and you probably get CUDs & other incentives to keep your business growing with them.

That said, I've never personally seen any cloud project where there wasn't a business case review that didn't include a review of architectural plans/assumptions and expected cloud service consumption profiling. I think what's different here is that you can help engineers close a feedback loop that is often left open between when a project is planned & scoped and when 1) the landing zone (or data pipelines) is created, and 2) when the app/system is moved from test/QA into production. This could be helpful for the project/product manager, especially, because anything that looks out of whack with the forecast should be escalated promptly.

This is amazing, I think it's best applied at CI/CD first, but having the plugin is good too for ICs to get it into a company.

How "smart" is it? Say I make a copy of a large database in TF and redeploy it into a staging env, will it know that the storage is $200 a month?

Also maybe put the supported clouds on the front page? I work multi-cloud so was worried it was only AWS.

Looks great based on the video!

As a data engineer in a consulting company: this would be a good way to get an idea of cost once we've written infra for projects.

Couple of questions:

1. Is Bicep supported?

2. Any plans for a VS Code plugin? (I just saw in your docs you have a plugin for this, great!)

3. How are you handling pricing of resources that are dependent on consumption?

Looks great! The markdown link to your site is broken.

I just installed to test this out and my cost isn't being calculated at all. I took a ekctl yml file and had chatGPT convert it to a terraform file; the terraform file validates; but nothing is discovered by Infracost plugin. I have it off my <project root>/deploy/terraform/. I wish there was some more feedback from the plugin why it cannot locate or visualize my cost.

This is nice but tackle it this ways might be unnecessarily complicated. I don't always need to look at the cost while writing code and it could fail to track, say, resources dynamically created with something like CDK.

More useful for me would be to plug directly into the account OR to analyse the cloud formation template, which can be easily obtained regardless of the IaC you're using.

Do you have some testimonials from customers to show us how do they use it and what value do they get out of it?

In my org 50k-100k cloud bill I don't see that much use for it (mainly we are not increasing our costs significantly and we roughly know what we are paying for).

I can see a lot of value for indie/small/medium sized biz but the commercial of that is too high in my opinion.

I've been an early user of Infracost and I cannot recommend it enough. It being in the CI/CD system is good but it being in the IDE is excellent. Cost is an important architecture concern and yet it's one of the most opaque things to deal with. This IDE plugin for Infracost fixes cost being opaque.

Excellent work, thanks for this.

This is nice but not very useful to me. What would be more useful in my use case is tooling to audit my cloud accounts periodically and reclaim garbage which is not used or re optimize my usage (smaller instances or databases depending on usage patterns) which directly saves me money.

Does it have Terragrunt (*.hcl) support? I see it mentioned no where but the infracost CLI has (https://www.infracost.io/docs/features/terragrunt/).

Looks interesting! I think cost of running resources would be more helpful

Would love to see a plugin/adapter for Snowflake.

BigQuery has a neat feature where it estimates the cost __before__ you run a query, which has often come in handy.

How crisp are the estimates of cost? I can see how they might depend heavily upon the dataset, especially when the algorithms are supralinear like O(n^2) or O(n^3).

Could similar be done for co2 emissions?

Do you plan to take discounts into account?

Can you base usage off previous billing data for existing resources?

Congrats!

It's almost a REPL for cloud costs! Amazing!

Hi Owen! This is Itay from Aqua, what a lovely surprise stumbling across this post :) This looks awesome, congrats and good luck

I was half hoping this would tell me how many dollars worth of CPU cycles my shitty code was wasting for no reason.