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Show HN: Cost.dev (YC W21) – making agents cost-aware and cheaper to call

29 points by akh

by 5701652400

2 subcomments

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

by 5701652400

2 subcomments

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

by zuzululu

1 subcomments

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

by jing09928

1 subcomments

The interesting bit is making cloud cost a first-class constraint for the agent loop, not just a post-hoc report. I'd be curious how you handle confidence/uncertainty in estimates, since a wrong cheap-looking recommendation can be worse than no estimate in infra PRs.

by zane_shu

1 subcomments

The useful split here seems to be: let the CLI do price lookup and validation, and let the agent decide which diff to make. The thing I’d watch is how visible the source of the estimate is in review — if a PR says “saved $X”, reviewers need to see which prices/rules produced that number.

by eugeneonai

1 subcomments

The 79% / 67% reduction generalizes broader than IaC. Any CLI agents shell out to (curl, jq, grep, kubectl, gh, psql) burns the same token tax — verbose JSON, free-form text output, agent-composed pipelines. A predicate-flag + compact-output redesign would land on all of those.

  Direct answer to your question: agents-writing-IaC-in-prod is rare today but not zero. I see more "agent reviews the IaC PR a human wrote", which Cost.dev sounds well-suited to since verification runs locally and the agent only consumes the result. Even if the prod-IaC path takes another year, the design pattern earns its keep on every agent-shellout you already do. One question: does the CLI surface its cache state to the agent, or does each invocation start fresh Repeated price-fetches across a single agent run would be the obvious next-tier savings.