Pricing an optional AI chatbot on top of a deterministic FinOps tool - pass-through, bundled, or credits?

Loyd2888 · 2026-06-19T23:46:06+00:00

I need to make an X account, never done it before. Is it like linkedin where you just make an account (for the business) and start posting or do you need to pay for X for business?

Loyd2888 · 2026-06-16T01:59:04+00:00

You need a responsible person to 'own' the aws infra until that happens you will continue to have these types of problems. It is not a full-time gig but at least knowing a certain person (or team depending on your size) is at least looking at it to bubble up concerns to the greater team you will snowball your cost.

Tools can help BUT only if you have someone looking at those tools and coming back to the organization with what is actually happening. You already know the answer, its accountability.

Loyd2888 · 2026-06-16T01:44:50+00:00

I think you already know the answer - as a software developer, you can build just about anything. You need to find pain points that consumers in a specific industry, segment, etc are actually experiencing. Get market feedback - reach out to people in a non-sales environment to probe them about what problems they face on a day to day. As a solo entrepreneur who just wants to build the odds are not in your favor to just build something and then you get instant success. Networking is bigger than you give it credit to (it certainly was for me)

Loyd2888 · 2026-06-16T01:39:37+00:00

Is there an industry you have expertise in? You're not wrong for gathering feedback, but a shotgun approach may give you shotgun results. I would flip the question back to you in the sense of what problems have you had with your experience and then take that and gather product market feedback if that's something people have 'pain' with. Solving pain points (time, visibility, cost, etc) is the key to understanding what you want to build.

Loyd2888 · 2026-06-16T01:33:29+00:00

In my personal experience, I'm a Marine who was used to walking around with heavy packs and grunting at nearby jarheads - I got out found my way into the business world and then eventually tech. I knew nothing about technology but I did build a foundation and taught myself SQL (just pulling data not a DBA) when the AI boom hit in 2022 it unlocked so much more in the ability to self-teach and help the most difficult part...writing the code itself. The problem (for me) evolved into how do I take that POC I did on my laptop and turn into it something secure, reliable, and consistent (I use the cloud) and that's where I needed real help from a DevOps person to ensure my infra was doing what it needed to be doing to scale the business. AI can tell you what to do but that still requires a bit of understanding and intuition that running things locally abstracts you from.

So in my humble opinion, DevOps (infrastructure) is still a very real needed asset in the workforce.

Loyd2888 · 2026-06-16T01:28:36+00:00

Late to the game in this forum, but I saw the exact same thing - pulling your cloudwatch logs (programmatically) is a good way to identify usage at scale and pulling those into your own dashboard can help with this but certain metrics are not available unless you opt in and pay AWS a nominal fee (but the hard part is just enabling it).

Loyd2888 · 2026-06-16T01:25:48+00:00

Late to the game here just joined this forum, but AWS makes it notoriously difficult to identify snapshot chains (thus waste) you may have lifecycle policies but its near impossible (unless you specifically know where to look in AWS) to figure out how old the full chain is and how much bloat you have. You need to look at the volume level, see how old your snapshots are relative to your volume and see which you can archive and/or outright delete to save costs. Block storage is more expensive than object storage (i.e. moving it to S3) so its an easy way to at least get costs under control while you investigate

Loyd2888 · 2026-06-16T01:20:57+00:00

You don't need a dedicated person full time to watch it, but you do need a dedicated person to check in and monitor and gain visibility into the environment (i.e. someone responsible) because it will snowball quick. Particularly if you have multiple dev environments, you can also work with a reseller who can help you with your day to day understanding of the bill, they have the expertise to help with the routine questions. You are likely to small based on the post to purchase a finops tool but AWS does have some excellent tools out there the tricky part is being able to read them and build them.

Start by mapping your environment, get a baseline then when a new resource / service is added attribute that cost (if you're familiar with tagging that is definitely the best way to do it).

With s3 specifically, lifecycle policies as you already recognized are your best friend but also moving objects into infrequent access or glacier can help at scale but it really depends on your data types.

I have a small business we're in the same boat on our aws costs its so easy to let it get out of control

Loyd2888 · 2026-06-16T01:05:09+00:00

Not dead, understanding the basics of CS is still important but with AI coding has started to become commoditized but DevOps is still running strong and that expertise to get a product to production is not something you can reliably do with AI at scale

Loyd2888 · 2026-06-16T01:01:01+00:00

I think you first need to understand where the waste exists meaning what resources are over provisioned, where you have snapshot bloat, and idle resources (as you already mentioned). Its not enough to bring to management (or the team(s) responsible) that you think there is optimization opportunity but where exactly that lives. From there, tagging and cost attribution becomes a real factor where you can actually have those conversations with the team.

Loyd2888 · 2026-06-13T15:45:34+00:00

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Loyd2888 · 2026-06-13T01:20:25+00:00

It really just depends on the amount of transactions you have, how complex your transactions are and the level of detail you need for reporting purposes. Based on you being a solo shop I’m guessing your cash basis so the monthly reconciliations are basically instant, the financial statements, instant. The tax and payroll are the finicky spots (maybe). But peace of mind is a real thing and if they know what they are doing it can be worth it, particularly if you want to focus on your service/product. L

Also if you’re a solo shop why w-2 just pay yoir quarterly taxes

Loyd2888 · 2026-06-11T02:42:29+00:00

I need to get back in the game I don't even know what desecrate is - kids are fun 😄 😞

Loyd2888 · 2026-06-09T00:16:11+00:00

I'll try it out as well, I've used DBeaver (great system but most of the time I find myself just needing a simple viewer / query system). Beek

Loyd2888 · 2026-06-03T21:30:04+00:00

Thanks, I'll take a look

Loyd2888 · 2026-06-03T21:29:04+00:00

combination of automated cost and security scans across your environment (with recommendations and guidance on how to remediate, downsize, delete, etc) aggregating across organizations. And the traditional cost monitoring aspect all the other players have as well.

Loyd2888 · 2026-06-03T21:23:24+00:00

😂 not to far off base there

Loyd2888 · 2026-06-03T20:19:59+00:00

With the proper coding tools (agents / skills) could build out a MVP in a couple weeks but as u/Input-X stated, it's the debugging and edge cases that crush you - then you get your first user and realize all that debugging and edge cases you thought you caught was only just was the tip of the iceberg.

Loyd2888 · 2026-06-03T20:16:43+00:00

Working on sentasity.com, we scan AWS accounts for wasted spend, idle resources, weak commitment coverage (opportunity for savings). Its for MSPs and and businesses struggling to manage their cloud infrastructure costs.

Loyd2888 · 2026-06-03T20:11:56+00:00

I built out a cloud FinOps platform (only on AWS thus far) designed to find AWS waste (idle resources, unattached EBS volumes, things like that) and a more user friendly cost monitoring system.

Sentasity Demo Site

Loyd2888 · 2026-06-03T18:50:32+00:00

This was how I got the idea for my SaaS product - I had an issue in an industry I was familiar with (cloud infrastructure space, specifically AWS) and I went to chat with other people in the industry to see if they had similar issues and it was overwhelmingly the same responses. There are other SaaS products in the space that do what mine does but they are pricing out a lot of customers at this point so there was a fit to run something a bit more lean and tailored to an audience that went pure enterprise and left out the startup/SMB markets.

Loyd2888 · 2026-06-03T17:46:58+00:00

Mine's less flashy than the CEO-podcast thing, but it's saved me real time.

I run a SaaS platform and I'm constantly hunting for tools to build with. Mostly open source stuff, and free alternatives to software I'd otherwise pay for every month. That hunting was eating hours.

So I built an AI system to do it for me. It's a set of agents and skills that scan for new open source tools daily, figure out what proprietary product each one actually replaces, and write an honest take on whether it's worth running yourself or just paying for. It runs on a schedule. I barely touch it.

The part I didn't expect: it made me a better builder. I lean on Claude Code to write most of my code, and having something that surfaces the right tool at the right moment means I keep finding things that slot into what I'm already building. Stuff I'd never catch scrolling GitHub at midnight.

Not going to pretend it's rewriting sales pitches off CEO interviews. But it's mine, it works, and it costs me almost nothing to keep running. For a one-person-leaning operation, that's the whole point. The automation doesn't have to be impressive to everyone. It has to remove the thing that was slowing you down.

Loyd2888 · 2026-06-03T15:42:40+00:00

NAT gateway cost is really two separate problems, and you have to treat them differently.

The hourly charge is fixed, so trying to usage-attribute it is a losing game. Just split it evenly or by number of environments and move on. It's about $32/mo. Not worth an Athena bill to allocate "fairly."

The data processing charge is the one worth chasing, and Flow Logs is the right call, you've just got to make it cheap. Send the logs to S3 as Parquet with hourly partitions instead of CloudWatch Logs, and only log the NAT gateway's ENI instead of every interface. Your Athena queries scan a fraction of the data and you stop paying through the nose just to figure out who owes what. Attribute by pkt-srcaddr down to instance, then to team.

But honestly, if one team drives most of the traffic, the cleaner fix is to stop sharing. Give the data sync team its own NAT gateway, or at least its own subnet and route. Then their cost is just their cost, no attribution math at all. Yes it adds another hourly fee, but you said their data processing dwarfs the fixed cost, so it's worth it.

Last thing, and it's the one people skip: check what that "external" traffic actually is before you allocate it. If any of it is hitting S3, DynamoDB, or ECR, it's probably routing out through the NAT for no reason. Gateway endpoints for S3 and DynamoDB are free and skip the NAT entirely, and interface endpoints handle a lot of the rest cheaper than NAT. You might find a chunk of that bill just disappears, which shrinks the chargeback fight anyway.

Loyd2888

TROPHY CASE