Hi HN,<p>Vantage is an alternative to the AWS console focused on developer experience and cost transparency. My background is in public cloud where I was the product lead for DigitalOcean’s Droplet product and at AWS on the container services product management team. Our team is 100% bootstrapped with two technical co-founders and a designer.<p>Vantage is ReadOnly by default and is meant to work alongside your existing automation tools. We aim to help address two problems: (1) navigate and organize resources across multiple AWS services, regions and accounts in an intuitively designed experience and (2) show where your costs are coming from in a simple manner. Some of our users have described us as “Mint.com for AWS accounts.”<p>In the future we are looking at automated recommendations to save you money, help identify orphaned resources and get into deployment of applications. In addition, we look to add support to other public cloud providers. For example imagine seeing your bandwidth usage on S3 and being able to automate a Cloudflare integration. Or see your Heroku and AWS resources in one place and get comparisons across providers.<p>This post represents our first official “launch” and we are eager to collect feedback. Please have mercy :)<p>Feel free to contact me directly at ben@vantage.sh if I can be helpful to you in your infrastructure journey.
Within 30 seconds of signing up for Vantage I discovered an old unused EC2 instance I was still paying $17/month for. This made me realize how weirdly hard it is to see a usable cost breakdown by resource on AWS...converted :)
I use Vantage and it's definitely a good product and all but the real value is every hour you don't have to spend using AWS directly.<p>I would pay _so_ much money to never have to use Cloudwatch and AWS Cost Management again. Thankfully, I qualify for the vantage free tier for quite a while longer.
Although this is a nice little simplified view into your AWS account I think calling it an "alternative AWS console" is misleading because you can't actually do anything with it, use it to make changes, etc.
Looks good, congrats! Open source alternative <a href="https://github.com/cloudquery/cloudquery" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/cloudquery/cloudquery</a>
I've always wondered why AWS doesn't just open source their console. it's such a usability disaster and there's so many developers that would love to contribute improvements to it. Wouldn't that make financial sense to Amazon?
At DigitalOcean (where I didn't overlap with Ben) we obviously thought a lot about how to improve the DX around interacting with cloud resources, both GUI-based and programmatically. Great to see someone taking that idea to its natural next step :)
I was a bit whelmed when I used it.<p>I expeced an alternative to the AWS console, but got a monitoring dashboard. Didn't seem like I could do much with it besides looking at my resources.
This is pretty nice, but it's not really an "alternative" to the console, is it? It's a pretty nice complementary monitoring dashboard though. Pricing wise, I have to be honest, I don't see myself paying $50 a month for a monitoring dashboard, as a solo dev or a small company.<p>Out of curiosity, why do you hide YouTube player controls on home page?
I've thought about the idea of re-implementing the AWS console, especially for the ends of a 'focused'/gated experience in the data science field; my reasoning was every service has an API and there is a JavaScript SDK, why not just reimplement the console to my tastes/goals? I'm curious what your architecture/design looks like and whether you ran into any sharp edges: ie is Web UI for a cloud platform really as simple as writing JS to call rest APIs?<p>Also, I'm wondering if the community has any other open source alternatives I could toy around with and peek under the hood.
Congrats on launching a product. I think it’s a great idea for small - medium sized shops to use this.<p>I used to be an SRE at a large company with a gigantic AWS account. While the console can be a mess, it’s really information dense and once you are familiar with it, you can find a lot of stuff. It also meant that it was easier to use awscli because you knew what was available without reading the docs.<p>I honestly don’t need things to look well designed with lots of white space at the expense of lowering the information density.<p>Cost saving views displayed in plaintext above resources are cool, but not better than the billing console which can be fairly powerful.
We've been using Vantage for a few months now and it's a really great layer on top of the AWS console. I particularly like the correlation of the metrics right in the dashboard - makes light-weight DevOps real easy.
I think there needs to be better pricing. I know pricing is hard but there should at least be a call to action if you have much a much bigger spend than what is on the pricing page.
In a sea of CMP options, what sets Vantage apart? Sincerely asking, as I cannot tell from the site's docs. And does Vantage leverage AWS Cost Anomaly Detection in any way?
Crazy how you need a tool that reads another tool to figure out how much you're spending for the original tool.<p>I'm sure there was a purpose for how the AWS console was originally built, but if someone spent this much time for an alternative, there's a clear problem in its original conception.
Hiya, interesting offering and exploring it now :)<p>How does this compare to, for example, stax.io which does similar cost transparency but also offers compliance monitoring and other elements?<p>The company I work with as a $250K/month spend on AWS and uses stax to hassle people to delete unused things :)
Congratulations on the launch. The cost estimation feature is awesome - very useful for people like me who are not very good at cleaning up resources. Also like the cross-region view without having to switch console regions.<p>This looks promising - good luck!
Congratulations on the launch. This looks fantastic!<p>AWS's release cadence is absolutely crazy - I can barely keep up with all the new releases. Are you planning on supporting all AWS services? If so, how are you planning on keeping up?
Everything that AWS offers comes with lots of caveats. I'm happy that good competition from Azure is forcing AWS to simplify some of of their services and make things a bit more straightforward.
Am I understanding correctly that if I have over 500 a month in spend there is no free trial option?<p>Also FYI the email verification hit my spam box on Gmail.<p>Edit: Also is there any way to have multiple users on a Vantage account?
Any thoughts on a self hosted version? (I didn't look too closely at all the marketing stuff if this is already addressed)<p>Would be nice to put something like this up behind our own VPN auth etc
I admit that I love this UI for cloud management, and I'd love more to be able to use it with GCP too because accessing GCP console is another kind of pain compared to AWS.
very cool view on my checkered history of failed and abandoned personal projects lol. nice to have it confirmed they're not still costing me money though!<p>one question. I have a couple projects on Amplify that don't pop up on my Vantage dashboard. Is it just a subset of AWS services that are included?