Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin
Show HN: Cost.dev (YC W21) – making agents cost-aware and cheaper to call (cost.dev)
24 points by akh 5 hours ago | hide | past | favorite | 9 comments
We launched Infracost on HN five years ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26064588) where our CLI generated cost estimates for infra-as-code, e.g. "this Terraform PR adds $400/mo". The idea was to shift cloud costs (FinOps) left, so engineers get visibility of costs before deployment and make better decisions.

Earlier this year we started seeing agent traffic in our logs and it looked like coding agents were calling our CLI. But that CLI wasn't designed with coding agents in mind. We went down a philosophical rabbit hole to see if a CLI is even needed anymore given that Claude, Copilot et al. already follow best practices. Ultimately we decided to create a new CLI from the ground up with coding agents in mind for two reasons:

1. We optimized the CLI for agent callers and cut Claude's output token usage by up to 79% and API cost by up to 67% versus a bare-Claude baseline. We wrote a blog documenting our lessons on optimizing user token usage when designing a CLI, e.g. using predicate flags so the agent doesn't compose jq | python | wc pipelines, output format that strips JSON's redundant field names. The blog is here: https://www.infracost.io/resources/blog/we-cut-claude-s-toke...

2. With cloud costs, precision matters. Telling a coding agent "make this Terraform cost-optimized" can be expensive and lossy. You burn tokens loading code and policy context into every conversation. Your agent could make up a price and you wouldn't know because it's difficult to verify that across the ~10M price points that AWS, Azure and Google have. The CLI runs static analysis on the code, uses the latest prices from cloud vendors, and passes that context to the coding agent.

So that's what we're launching today - Cost.dev: https://cost.dev/.

- It runs locally. Your code never leaves your machine, you get a fast feedback loop, and you're not burning API calls per character when you want to fetch prices.

- The CLI does the deterministic work. Fetching price points, scanning the code, validating fixes. The coding agent does the natural-language part. You don't have to trust the LLM to remember the rules, and can verify it called the right CLI command.

- It provides a consistent rule layer across every tool you use. Get cost estimates in your IDE and your coding agent with a single install. We support Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Windsurf, OpenAI Codex, Gemini CLI, as well as IDEs like VS Code and JetBrains

Before we keep building more in that direction, I want to sanity-check with HN: is "agents writing IaC in prod" actually a thing yet, or am I betting on a future that's still a year out? I know software developers are using coding agents heavily, but are platform/infra folks doing that for prod too? Also, if you have any feedback on Cost.dev, I'd love to hear it!

 help



I don't know how they can justify 250 USD / month bill. let alone 1000 USD / month.

reply


We prevent way more than that from being added to the cloud bill by showing engineers cost estimates that enables them to make better decisions pre-deploy - e.g. when an engineer knows the IOPS option on their EC2 instance is costing them a lot, they're more likely to reduce that or not use that in dev envs vs just copy/paste what's on production. There's an ROI report on infracost.io that shows how we measure the cost prevention between the first and last commit on merged PRs.

reply


Seems to be targeted at quickly reducing infa cost for small-human teams with high-compute costs. I can see some value, but it's something I'd want to review quarterly instead of per-commit. I might feel different if I was really trying to stretch some runway.

I can see why YC is interested in this issue, as I'm sure lots of startups are trying to stretch that runway.

reply


When we started, we thought everyone could use it from startups to medium sized companies. What we learnt is that the most value comes for the enterprises. The reason is they have used Terraform to decentralize the infra provisioning, so now instead of a central platform team making all the IaC changes, you have hundreds or thousands of engineers making changes every month.

Each of them are making a lot of decisions on the infra. and that combines with the crazy pricing models from the cloud providers was saving companies a lot of money.

Then, we saw how much time is saved when you catch it at this point vs after the fact. Basically avoiding a bunch of tech debt

reply


why would anyone need 10,000 runs a month? do people modify their infrastructure 10,000 times a month?

reply


CI/CD pipelines needs 1 CLI run per commit (like any other code scanning tool), we regularly see enterprises with 100K+ runs/month.

reply


Ephemeral environments

reply


Not really seeing the point I just use openrouter if I'm penny pinching

reply


OpenRouter is great for keeping your LLM API bill down, Infracost is about the AWS/Azure/GCP bill your IaC creates. When an agent writes IaC that creates a NAT gateway or an RDS instance, that's $50-5000/mo in cloud spend, so the agent knowing that estimate and the best practices as it's generating the code can optimize it pre-deploy.

reply




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: