[glenngillen]

Former AWS employee here, and just generally been in the infra/cloud space for a long time. I've seen a few of these products (or this feature within existing products) over the years. The things that always gives me an extreme amount of pause, and why I'd never personally be willing to pursue this as a startup myself, are:

* Amazon in general is famous for using scale to drive down costs and/or attack the margin of competitors. So much so that a Bezos quote of "your margin is my opportunity" regularly gets thrown around. This is a direct attack on what is essentially fat AWS margin. Which isn't itself bad. Maybe they've grown complacent and lazy? It does worry me though when the strategy is essentially taking on the reigning champion by using their own game against them, where they both have the home ground advantage and get to set the rules. You're one feature/packaging/pricing change away from becoming irrelevant.

* The huge information asymmetry. AWS can see _all_ the data. They have entire teams dedicated to building models around it. They know who should be on RIs, for what term, the impact to both them and customers. For even the most moderate sized customers and above there are people who have a KPI on driving RI usage + cost reductions into those accounts. How much opportunity is there really? Prospects who have the most to gain from this should theoretically have SAs/TAMs/etc. telling them every month to take these actions. They've either done the low-hanging fruit already or aren't interested because of other competing priorities. I'm not sure another third-party tool changes those things.

* The black swan risk of the insurance-like underwriting of carrying RIs. The models for all of these when I've looked into them meant there was tail risk around a large number of customer simultaneously deciding to hand back their RIs. And there's a lot of reasonable justification to believe that's unlikely. It also doesn't feel like a massive stretch of the imagination to think that a change in macro conditions + a shift to a far more aggressive red ocean strategy + a new instance family + AWS' history of discounting new instances on a $/performance basis to encourage adoption/migration = a huge price drop to drive both competitive and architecture migration en masse. The value of the RIs for what's now considered "legacy compute" would plummet overnight.

All that skepticism aside, the things I continually find most interesting in this space are the general usability and UX improvements. AWS consistently has a pretty suboptimal user experience, and the billing aspects in-particular can be indecipherable at even a trivial level of scale. So maybe the opportunity here is less about attacking margin and more about the fact customers are leaving money on the table purely because AWS make it so dang hard understand and improve things?