Show HN: CloudForecast.io – Daily email report to help you monitor your AWS cost

Do you need a lightweight and affordable AWS cost monitoring tool? CloudForecast is a daily email report that breaks down your AWS spend, allowing you to understand where your money is going. View spend by Products, Tags, and Sub Accounts and quickly know which areas need your attention.<p>CloudForecast is a passion project designed to deliver the value of enterprise level AWS monitoring to startups and midsize companies. Between the three of us, we’ve managed annual AWS budgets of $10M+ and know how to help you save on cloud costs.<p>As longtime HN fans, we want to make this easy for HNers to try us out! Fill out a 3 question survey to double the length of your free trial. Email us at hello@cloudforecast.io for more information or if you have any questions!

We have been using this at Adzerk since an early beta and it&#x27;s been just what we needed. We used to pay 2% to another cloud pricing company and we were able to cancel that since we started using CloudForecast.io, saving us thousands of dollars a month. If you find yourself not using all the fancy features of the bigger tools, save yourself some money and use this great tool instead.

Some tips to improve the website (Last time I did this <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=16621584" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=16621584</a>):<p>Make the header&#x27;s height larger. It&#x27;s very, unusually small, compared to the vast majority of the internet. At least add some top&#x2F;bottom padding.<p>Please work on the contrast of the &quot;Start Free Trial&quot; buttons, they are hard to read.<p>Use or configure your header&#x2F;menu font better. On chrome, windows 10 it&#x27;s ugly: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;FpsHTkX.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;FpsHTkX.png</a><p>Add some effect to the screenshot, so people it&#x27;s a screenshot of the app and not some random image.<p>Add some color to the references slider&#x27;s arrows. No contrast there.<p>The pricing buttons being different is weird: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;qJI9cPw.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;qJI9cPw.png</a><p>Fix the legends being blurry in this screenshot: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cloudforecast.io&#x2F;images&#x2F;CloudForecast-email---as-of-3-25-18-p-1600.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cloudforecast.io&#x2F;images&#x2F;CloudForecast-email---as-of-...</a><p>Change the &quot;Contact Us&quot; links to an actual page, showing the email, and a mailto handler there. I really dislike how it is right now (link with mailto handler), as I may not be interested to email right away. Maybe I&#x27;m looking for where you guys are HQ&#x27;d?<p>--- on app.cloudforecast.io<p>2005 called, they want their button borders back: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;eSitJwC.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;eSitJwC.png</a><p>A text with &quot;I accept the Terms&quot; is not consent.<p>There is no Data Usage&#x2F;GDPR info linked on the signup screen. How is my data used?<p>Maybe use some different typeface for these progress labels? They look bland, boring, and I only saw them at the third look. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;qcoAuHs.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;qcoAuHs.png</a>

This is definitely a problem worth solving, and this looks like a nice solution.<p>I like the use of weather as an at-a-glance shorthand. This is something I&#x27;d be looking at every day, and the faster I can glean the information the better. Can you share a little more about what might make things &quot;stormy&quot; vs. &quot;clear&quot;?<p>Also, just out of curiosity, what&#x27;s your tech stack look like?

We have been using this at Doximity for a while now it is excellent. The daily reports and clear indicators of increase&#x2F;decrease are helpful to identify spikes at a glance.

We use this at the company I work for, Slingshot, and it has definitely been helpful for keeping an eye on things like huge dev environments that get spun up and not shut back down (I should note: I&#x27;m as often the guilty party as anyone else) as well as regular spending. We started using it because the pricing was a lot more small&#x2F;medium business friendly than some of the other options out there. The team at CloudForecast has been really receptive to requests for new features and they seem to be committed to continuing to improve the product. For instance, the new cost savings report has a lot of potential, so looking forward to seeing where that goes. Saying that reminds me that I still need to respond to their request for feedback on that...

Nice service. At the moment, I have set a couple of billing alarms which trigger at certain thresholds, so that I know if we are going to be over budget by the end of the month. But a daily report would be handy.<p>Our usage is fairly low (~$1K&#x2F;mo), so even the lowest pricing tier is not within our subscription budget now, but I can see it being so as we grow.<p>One question (I haven&#x27;t gone through the specs in detail) but does the daily email provide other hints on saving costs as well (i.e. alerts when a reserved instance expires etc.)?

Looks great, would love and use something like this for GCP

I&#x27;m not sure why I would want to use this instead of Amazon&#x27;s built in tools?

Any plans to extend this to other cloud providers like Azure and GCS?

Awesome job, Kacy!