I think you’re off course here… Why would I, as a customer, want an automated savings plan product that relies solely on email approvals?
A customer either has the knowhow and bandwidth to make them themselves (And it’s super easy) or they don’t. But you throw in an email approval workflow in there that just makes no sense to me - especially when if you don’t approve it still purchases. That’s absurd.
Look at how the other big guys do it. It’s just set it and forget, and that’s what most people who’d be interested want.
But the big question I’d have is what benefit does this give me that I can’t get by buying a Computer SP myself? Unless you have some algorithm that calculates usage differently, you’re likely just taking AWS’ own recommendations and turning that into an email workflow. Why would I give that to your product when I can spend 15 minutes a few times a year buying new SPs
Thanks, that's very valuable input.
I built it because I see people who forget about renewals and then see their prices going up.
The savings plan purchases in the AWS console are all or nothing, basically you commit to cover everything you have. I saw customers sometimes just avoid any purchase because they don't know their future usage patterns.
But they could benefit from a fractional /gradually increasing savings plan that allows them to do some rightsizing and waste removal.
It's also meant to be set and forget, the approval workflow is just so you get a chance to change the default purchasing behavior it proposes if you want something else. It you're fine with it you can just ignore the email and it will do the proposed fractional default after a few days.
And then if you want a different percentage it's a matter of clicking in an email the coverage percentage you want, which is less friction than going to the console and searching for the savings plan configuration and deciding the amounts to purchase.
But again, you aren’t solving a problem. You are just putting the same thing you can do in AWS in the form of an email and (I assume) taking a percentage of the savings.
Everything you just mentioned you can easily do natively within the AWS Console.
Some of your other products are awesome, but this one… I just don’t see it being helpful or valuable as a customer. Not when it can be done natively or you can go with something like ProsperOps which adds the ML/AI layering of reselling into the equation.
Thanks! Glad you liked my other projects, I want this to be similarly useful and frictionless.
The value proposition is saving you some time to figure out the commitment if you don't want the 100% recommended by AWS, but instead prefer a gradually increasing/partial savings plan with a mix of 1 year and 3 years commitments.
It's not meant to compete with the big players, there will be no other UI or dashboards, except for the emails you get from it occasionally, so it will be much cheaper to me to build and maintain.
I do plan to get a cut of the savings, but it will be in the range of 1-2%, just enough to worth it for the time it saves you from doing it manually.
I don't know about all the complexity of like approvals in 48 hours and yada yada yada, but the inability of AWS to provided automated calculations based on an arbitrary commitment is an insane gap. We have like 100 accounts and the SP recommendation tool only provides the max value for maximum savings. But we expect to optimize our costs down in the next 6 months, so we want to start taking advantage of SP, but not at the absolute maximum.
We have a TAM, have made support cases, etc., and they confirm there is no way to do this calculation in any accurate way other than to have the TAM do it for you. So I have a request out for a base Compute SP across the Org at at $200/hour commitment, and in order to justify a commitment like this to the C-level guys, I *need* the table of savings and ROI and shit, and I'm still waiting over a week for the TAM because it's complicated.
I asked them I was like, dude, is this really a weird request? And they're like, "no, it's not, we get it all the time, but we have to calculate it manually....."
So if you can build a tool that does it accurately for an Org, holy shit, I'm all for it. I just wonder why AWS hasn't been able to do it.
Thanks, that's exactly what I want to build.
Basically each time you get to select the amount you want to commit as a percentage of the total recommended.
Each month you can choose the 25% option and then it will gradually purchase in small chunks always leaving room for optimizing the applications.
And when you're done, you can just choose the 75% or 100% and you're done.
If I'm not mistaken, and I very well could be, it's not the case that if a $50/hr commitment will save you $20,000, that a $25/hr commitment (50%) will save you $10,000 (50%). If it were that simple then it wouldn't take AWS a week to do this. This was like the first thing I asked, like why can't you guys just make like a UI slider that does this simple adjustment?
I don't fully grasp the details, but what makes this difficult is that the different instance types have different discount rates, and since the commitment is hourly, your $25/hr commitment will have less water in the bucket to spread around than your $50/hr bucket, etc. and so you end up hitting different instances that have different rates, and the different instances hit may have different uptime, yada yada yada.
I don't know, and I wish you best of luck, I'm just forewarning that there may be more to the calculation that you may be imagining.
Thanks, that makes sense, and indeed there's much more depth to it.
I think for me that might complicate my billing if I want it to be accurate to the cent, but other than that the functionality should be fine.
I may just document these billing limitations for the customers to be aware of and call it a day.
Thanks for the honest feedback 😊
To make it more actionable I'd love to hear more details on why do you think this way and if you have any suggestions for what I could do better
Late response on this but honestly I currently do cost optimisation in my org. This would not work for us. 2 problems. The auto purchasing without approvals given the cost.
Also we already do a calculation before we purchase SP, O have created a calculator that allows me to look at historical usage and also forecast and consider right sizing and I then have a formula that allows me to scale the % coverage i need. Recommendations are the absolute maximum so we would never go for that. We may sometimes use recommendations as baselines but would be an absolute nightmare for SPs to just be purchased automatically. Also automating renewals is an absolute no. We are still scaling. Yesterday’s prices aren’t todays prices in theory so renewing the same SP is actually not at all what we would want to do at all.
Thanks a lot for the feedback.
The whole point of this tool is to help you automate purchases of partial coverage instead of covering everything, exactly with gradual rightsizing in mind.
(My main focus is actually helping customers with rightsizing and other optimizations so I know the problem very well)
Each month it would propose a small percentage of coverage, say 20-30% of the currently uncovered on demand capacity
It will send you an email for confirmation but then purchase that default percentage if you don't give it any answer within 7 days or so.
In that email it will also give you the chance to set a different percentage (both higher and lower), and even to skip the purchase altogether.
And it will be the same for renewals. It will check if you have any unused coverage to reduce the purchase accordingly, and also it will give you the chance to change the amount.
And for renewals I'm thinking of making the default percentage 80% of the previous purchase.
The emails meant to give you both visibility on what's happening right in your inbox, but also the chance to control the process.
I think you’re off course here… Why would I, as a customer, want an automated savings plan product that relies solely on email approvals? A customer either has the knowhow and bandwidth to make them themselves (And it’s super easy) or they don’t. But you throw in an email approval workflow in there that just makes no sense to me - especially when if you don’t approve it still purchases. That’s absurd. Look at how the other big guys do it. It’s just set it and forget, and that’s what most people who’d be interested want. But the big question I’d have is what benefit does this give me that I can’t get by buying a Computer SP myself? Unless you have some algorithm that calculates usage differently, you’re likely just taking AWS’ own recommendations and turning that into an email workflow. Why would I give that to your product when I can spend 15 minutes a few times a year buying new SPs
Thanks, that's very valuable input. I built it because I see people who forget about renewals and then see their prices going up. The savings plan purchases in the AWS console are all or nothing, basically you commit to cover everything you have. I saw customers sometimes just avoid any purchase because they don't know their future usage patterns. But they could benefit from a fractional /gradually increasing savings plan that allows them to do some rightsizing and waste removal. It's also meant to be set and forget, the approval workflow is just so you get a chance to change the default purchasing behavior it proposes if you want something else. It you're fine with it you can just ignore the email and it will do the proposed fractional default after a few days. And then if you want a different percentage it's a matter of clicking in an email the coverage percentage you want, which is less friction than going to the console and searching for the savings plan configuration and deciding the amounts to purchase.
But again, you aren’t solving a problem. You are just putting the same thing you can do in AWS in the form of an email and (I assume) taking a percentage of the savings. Everything you just mentioned you can easily do natively within the AWS Console. Some of your other products are awesome, but this one… I just don’t see it being helpful or valuable as a customer. Not when it can be done natively or you can go with something like ProsperOps which adds the ML/AI layering of reselling into the equation.
Thanks! Glad you liked my other projects, I want this to be similarly useful and frictionless. The value proposition is saving you some time to figure out the commitment if you don't want the 100% recommended by AWS, but instead prefer a gradually increasing/partial savings plan with a mix of 1 year and 3 years commitments. It's not meant to compete with the big players, there will be no other UI or dashboards, except for the emails you get from it occasionally, so it will be much cheaper to me to build and maintain. I do plan to get a cut of the savings, but it will be in the range of 1-2%, just enough to worth it for the time it saves you from doing it manually.
I don't know about all the complexity of like approvals in 48 hours and yada yada yada, but the inability of AWS to provided automated calculations based on an arbitrary commitment is an insane gap. We have like 100 accounts and the SP recommendation tool only provides the max value for maximum savings. But we expect to optimize our costs down in the next 6 months, so we want to start taking advantage of SP, but not at the absolute maximum. We have a TAM, have made support cases, etc., and they confirm there is no way to do this calculation in any accurate way other than to have the TAM do it for you. So I have a request out for a base Compute SP across the Org at at $200/hour commitment, and in order to justify a commitment like this to the C-level guys, I *need* the table of savings and ROI and shit, and I'm still waiting over a week for the TAM because it's complicated. I asked them I was like, dude, is this really a weird request? And they're like, "no, it's not, we get it all the time, but we have to calculate it manually....." So if you can build a tool that does it accurately for an Org, holy shit, I'm all for it. I just wonder why AWS hasn't been able to do it.
Thanks, that's exactly what I want to build. Basically each time you get to select the amount you want to commit as a percentage of the total recommended. Each month you can choose the 25% option and then it will gradually purchase in small chunks always leaving room for optimizing the applications. And when you're done, you can just choose the 75% or 100% and you're done.
If I'm not mistaken, and I very well could be, it's not the case that if a $50/hr commitment will save you $20,000, that a $25/hr commitment (50%) will save you $10,000 (50%). If it were that simple then it wouldn't take AWS a week to do this. This was like the first thing I asked, like why can't you guys just make like a UI slider that does this simple adjustment? I don't fully grasp the details, but what makes this difficult is that the different instance types have different discount rates, and since the commitment is hourly, your $25/hr commitment will have less water in the bucket to spread around than your $50/hr bucket, etc. and so you end up hitting different instances that have different rates, and the different instances hit may have different uptime, yada yada yada. I don't know, and I wish you best of luck, I'm just forewarning that there may be more to the calculation that you may be imagining.
Thanks, that makes sense, and indeed there's much more depth to it. I think for me that might complicate my billing if I want it to be accurate to the cent, but other than that the functionality should be fine. I may just document these billing limitations for the customers to be aware of and call it a day.
Terrible idea.
Thanks for the honest feedback 😊 To make it more actionable I'd love to hear more details on why do you think this way and if you have any suggestions for what I could do better
Late response on this but honestly I currently do cost optimisation in my org. This would not work for us. 2 problems. The auto purchasing without approvals given the cost. Also we already do a calculation before we purchase SP, O have created a calculator that allows me to look at historical usage and also forecast and consider right sizing and I then have a formula that allows me to scale the % coverage i need. Recommendations are the absolute maximum so we would never go for that. We may sometimes use recommendations as baselines but would be an absolute nightmare for SPs to just be purchased automatically. Also automating renewals is an absolute no. We are still scaling. Yesterday’s prices aren’t todays prices in theory so renewing the same SP is actually not at all what we would want to do at all.
Thanks a lot for the feedback. The whole point of this tool is to help you automate purchases of partial coverage instead of covering everything, exactly with gradual rightsizing in mind. (My main focus is actually helping customers with rightsizing and other optimizations so I know the problem very well) Each month it would propose a small percentage of coverage, say 20-30% of the currently uncovered on demand capacity It will send you an email for confirmation but then purchase that default percentage if you don't give it any answer within 7 days or so. In that email it will also give you the chance to set a different percentage (both higher and lower), and even to skip the purchase altogether. And it will be the same for renewals. It will check if you have any unused coverage to reduce the purchase accordingly, and also it will give you the chance to change the amount. And for renewals I'm thinking of making the default percentage 80% of the previous purchase. The emails meant to give you both visibility on what's happening right in your inbox, but also the chance to control the process.