Show HN: I Market-Make AWS Cloud Contracts to Save Companies $40M+

9 points by kavehkhorram 3 years ago · 3 comments · 2 min read

Hey HN: Kaveh here, the founder of https://www.usage.ai/

We help companies drive down AWS EC2 spend by buying and selling 3-year no-upfront reserved instances. Why? Because there's almost no liquidity on the AWS EC2 RI Marketplace and it can take a while, if at all, to sell an RI if you need to stop using one.

Previous to founding Usage, I worked at JPMorgan Chase as a summer analyst.

Here's how it works: We are typically brought in by a DevOps manager to cut AWS EC2 costs. The app is entirely self-service and the savings are generated automatically, typically we do this live on a call. On average, we reduce AWS EC2 spend by 50% for 5 minutes of work.

To reduce by 50%+, we've built a pool of reserved instances that's shared across our pool of customers. When a customer scales up their EC2s, Usage buys RIs. When a customer scales down their EC2s, Usage sells RIs. At this point, we've saved companies tens of millions of dollars in spend and have a lot of liquidity, so we take on very little risk.

We make money off of a 20% Savings Fee. Happy to chat directly kaveh@usage.ai

Have you experienced any issues with managing your company or organization's AWS expenses? We'd love to hear your feedback and ideas!