[StratusBen]

Disclosure: I'm Co-Founder and CEO of a cloud cost company named https://www.vantage.sh/ - I also used to be on the product management team at AWS and DigitalOcean.

I'm not intentionally trying to shill but this is exactly why people choose to use Vantage. We give them a set of features for automating and understanding what they can do to manage and save on costs. We're also adding multi-cloud support (GCP is in early access, Azure is coming) to be a single pane of glass into cloud costs.

If anyone needs help on this stuff, I really love it. We have a generous free tier and free trial. We also have a Slack community of ~400 people nerding out on cloud costs.

[vdm]

https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fdocs.va...

I gave vantage.sh 5 minutes and did not see anything for S3 that is not already available from the built-in Cost Explorer, Storage Lens, Cost and Usage Reports, and taking 1 hour to study the docs https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/userguide/Bucket...

Most "cloud optimisation" products want to tell you which EC2 instance type to use, but can't actually give actionable advice for S3. Happy to be corrected on this.

[simonw]

Saving people from learning how to use Cost Explorer, Storage Lens, Cost and Usage Reports - and then taking 1 hour to study documentation - sounds to me like a legitimate market opportunity.

[alar44]

Not really. Sometimes you actually have to understand things. If you're so concerned about your billing, someone on your team should probably invest a freaking hour to understand it. If that can't happen, you are just setting yourself up for failure.

[Jgrubb]

I've been learning the ins and outs of the major 3 providers cloud billing setups for the last year, and I'm just getting started. This is not a 1 hour job, but you're right that someone in your team needs to understand it.

[llbeansandrice]

At my last job we had a team spend an entire quarter just to help visualize and properly track all of our AWS expenditures. It's a huge job.

[beberlei]

Not confused why there is talk about software developer shortage when it seems a good amount of them work on this kind of nonsense. Talk about bs jobs.

[sokoloff]

If you are willing and able to spend an entire team for a quarter, I think you'd be better off for quite a while to just license Cloudability (now maybe Apptio). Its face value isn't "cheap", but for most companies, I think it's going to be cheaper than a team for a quarter plus the on-going maintenance of that tech.

(We're a long-time Cloudability customer; no other connection/conflict of interest here.)

[banku_brougham]

its a lot more than an hour, in my experience

[StratusBen]

We are in process of updating the documentation because you're right that it needs more work. For the record, if you're doing everything on your own via Cost Explorer, Storage Lens and processing CUR you may be set. From what we hear, most folks do not want to deal with processing CUR (or even know what it is) and struggle with Cost Explorer.

Vantage automates everything you just mentioned to allow you to make quicker decisions. Here's a screenshot of what we do on a S3 Bucket basis: https://s3.amazonaws.com/assets.vantage.sh/www/s3_example.pn...

We'll profile storage classes and the number of objects, tell you the exact cost of turning on things like intelligent tiering and how much that will cost with specific potential savings. This is all done out of the box, automatically - and we profile List/Describe APIs to always discover newly created S3 Buckets.

From speaking with hundreds of customers, I can also assure you that at a certain scale, billing does not take an hour...there are entire teams built around this at larger companies.

[samlambert]

Vantage is a seriously awesome product. We love it at PlanetScale. Obviously being a cloud product things can get pricy and so Vantage is essential.

[cookiesboxcar]

I love vantage. Thank you for making it.

[imwillofficial]

I work on a team the computes bills, shoot me a slack invite and perhaps I can offer insight.