Company
Date Published
Author
Hassan Khajeh Hosseini
Word count
486
Language
English
Hacker News points
None

Summary

In 2012, a Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) calculator was developed to help companies estimate cloud infrastructure costs by scraping pricing data from AWS, Azure, and GCP, as APIs weren't available then. With cloud pricing complexity increasing and nearly 4 million prices now available via Cloud Pricing API, traditional calculators and Excel spreadsheets have become inadequate for accurate cost estimation. The goal is to eliminate these outdated tools by creating a new product that excels in speed and accuracy, integrating cost estimation directly into the development process. This improved solution includes a VS Code extension that provides real-time cost estimates as engineers type their infrastructure code, promising more precise financial forecasting without slowing down development. Additionally, team collaboration is enhanced through Infracost CI/CD, which automates cost estimates within pull requests, and future plans aim to build an end-to-end automated workflow from project management tools like Jira to cost estimation.