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Launch HN: Taloflow (YC W21) – Find the top cloud or dev tools for your use case

79 pointsby cloudfalconabout 4 years ago
Hi HN,<p>We are Jason, Todd and LV - we&#x27;re building Taloflow (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.taloflow.ai" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.taloflow.ai</a>) to help developers find and evaluate cloud and API products based on their use case, requirements, and budget.<p>Have you ever wondered whether you should move a particular workload off of AWS to GCP? Or which database to build on? Or which APM is best for your size, architecture, and budget?<p>A little over a year ago, we launched a cloud management tool for AWS. A few months after launch, we learned that many of the dev teams we were working with were actively looking for alternative cloud products and dev tools to improve their stack. They generally found the investigation and testing process to be error-prone and a time suck (finding what fits the use case requirements, reading docs, sitting on sales calls, projecting costs in complex spreadsheets, etc.).<p>Similarly, while building our own product, we implemented several cloud and dev tools into our own stack. Some worked, and some were terrible. Time after time, we were fooled by the marketing language, lacked use case-based information to inform our decision, and generally found third-party review sites not as helpful when it comes to buying a cloud or dev tool. Why? Comparing options with info relevant to our specific use case was the missing piece, and there were several dozen dimensions to consider.<p>We built two ways to help you pinpoint which products best fit your use case.<p>The first walks you through a &quot;Quick match&quot; questionnaire that is designed with the help of domain experts for particular categories (e.g.: object storage, data pipelines, APM, etc.) to help you define your requirements and then rank options within a product category based on the inputs.<p>For example, in object storage, we collect use case info (Do you provide information to customers frequently and quickly? Do you perform intensive ML tasks? Do you work with large graphical or video objects?, etc.), integration info (CDN, Redshift&#x2F;BigQuery&#x2F; or other Data Abstraction Tools), budget, compliance, etc. to build a holistic use case profile to help filter and rank products.<p>We then scour our database of developer docs, pricing pages, private pricing, reviews from experts, and internal tests for various types of use cases to find the best use case fit.<p>The second way we solve this is by actually ingesting telemetry from various cloud applications (AWS, GCP, Azure, Twilio, Datadog, etc.) and providing a cost-benefit analysis on the performance and cost trade-offs of implementing various products. We can answer questions like &quot;What are the egress and hidden fees of moving from Azure Blob to Backblaze B2, Storj or Wasabi?&quot; or &quot;What&#x27;s the most performant APM for my architecture?&quot;, etc.<p>We’re currently experimenting with pricing, but we make money by selling more advanced or ongoing analysis to our members, up-selling our SaaS solutions for cloud infra and dev tool management, and occasionally collecting a standardized referral fee from vendors who happen to be good matches for you.<p>We&#x27;re currently live for Object Storage and will soon launch for AI&#x2F;ML tools, CPaaS (e.g.: Twilio, MessageBird, etc.), CI&#x2F;CD tools (e.g.: Jenkins, Buildkite), and APM (e.g.: DataDog). If you don&#x27;t mind getting ad-hoc analysis for categories we don&#x27;t fully support yet, we have an option for that too. We&#x27;d love your feedback on our product and want to hear from you what product categories you need help researching.

9 comments

bradhiltonabout 4 years ago
I just tried out the tool for Object Storage and was pleasantly surprised with the resulting experience. I really like this; great work!
omarhaneefabout 4 years ago
It would be useful to see this tool used for other SaaS.<p>Want to manage a (1) 10-50 person (2) construction firm in (3) the US, should you use Basecamp, Asana or Wrike?<p>You have a (1) 50-100 person (2) Tech firm should you use docusign or hello for document management?<p>And if you already have and are committed to Quickbooks, does it change any of the answers above?
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fthead9about 4 years ago
I think you&#x27;re solving a problem that is becoming increasingly critical for many businesses. AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure are so enterprise focused that startups to mid-level businesses are getting killed once their storage credits run out and they have to pay full enterprise prices. Finding alternatives is a painful process of trial and error. Having a trusted recommendation engine would go a long way towards relieving that pain point. Good luck!
flotothemoonabout 4 years ago
Neat! I often find myself cross-referencing dozens of blogs, HN and Reddit articles to figure out all the little critical differences between products. Particularly in deployment &amp; machine learning related software it&#x27;s often hard to discern what the solutions actually provide beneath all the buzzwords on the landing page.<p>PS: The &quot;Guide -&gt; Select a category&quot; page gives me some errors and requires a few reloads to work properly. I get: &quot;Firefox can’t establish a connection to the server at wss:&#x2F;&#x2F;app.papercups.io&#x2F;socket&#x2F;websocket?vsn=2.0.0.&quot; (probably unrelated) &quot;Cross-Origin Request Blocked: The Same Origin Policy disallows reading the remote resource at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;o454487.ingest.sentry.io&#x2F;api&#x2F;5636106&#x2F;envelope&#x2F;?sentry_key=1716822ae71e4e1288da6c52dd09b04a&amp;sentry_version=7" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;o454487.ingest.sentry.io&#x2F;api&#x2F;5636106&#x2F;envelope&#x2F;?sentr...</a>. (Reason: CORS request did not succeed)&quot; (also probably unrelated, but means you probably won&#x27;t have this particular problem logged)
stetsabout 4 years ago
Awesome to see this on the front-page, guys. Nice!<p>- if you monetize partly by collecting referral fees, do you plan to stay vendor-agnostic? how?<p>- over time, as products change via acquisition, updates, etc, how can you keep the various metrics, fees, features organized and up-to-date? This seems like immense work to me
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dkcdkcabout 4 years ago
So dope to see y&#x27;all on the front page. Great team and product. Can&#x27;t wait to see the future growth!
frenchie4111about 4 years ago
There appears to be a recent trend of YC companies being increasingly &quot;meta&quot; plays. The increasing number of &quot;startups for startups&quot; worries me, it&#x27;s a leverage against the success of startups. It will increase the upward and downward slope of the startup market. Leverage leads to bubbles, and bubbles burst<p>Note: This product looks great, I will probably use it, my comment is not intended to disparage taloflow specifically.
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fireeyedabout 4 years ago
Shovel for locating other shovels. Neat idea
GKND95about 4 years ago
We&#x27;ve constantly asked ourselves this as we built our tech stack, love the idea!