Easily build complex reports
Monitoring and efficiency metrics
Custom cost allocation tags
Network cost visibility
Organizational cost hierarchies
Budgeting and budget alerts
Discover active resources
Consumption-based insights
Alerts for unexpected charges
Automated AWS cost savings
Discover cost savings
Unified view of AWS discounts
COGS and business metrics
Model savings plans
Collaborate on cost initiatives
Create and manage your teams
Automate cloud infrastructure
Cloud cost issue tracking
Cloud data through AI
Detect cost spikes
by Ben Schaechter
Over four years ago, Vantage acquired ec2instances.info: the popular open-source tool for evaluating Amazon EC2 server specifications and accompanying pricing. We actually acquired the site when the Company was only two people and before even raising any investment. We had an idea of how it could contribute as a channel for the company, but didn’t realize quite how big the site would get. Ec2instances.info was even shared in our Seed deck as part of our GTM strategy for the company, a very early decision, as you can see below.
Seed deck ec2instances.info slides
A lot has happened in 4 years since then, but the original codebase had largely stayed the same. We’ve consistently invested in the original, antiquated codebase and attempted to respond to features and functionality as part of our small-but-nimble marketing team’s roles and responsibilities. For long durations of time, Vantage employees were the only contributors to the property. Along the way, the site has grown tremendously from about 275,000 unique users to nearly 4,000,000.
The one thing that’s been consistent during that timeframe, though, is that that site was really poor from a developer experience perspective. The codebase was old, only lightly maintained, and it made contributing and, more importantly, delivering value to end-users really difficult and slow. As a result, decided to entirely rewrite the site. We’d invest in a modern codebase with a few goals:
With those goals in mind, we worked with a few outside contractors to speed things up and deliver value. In order to move quickly, we made the decision to develop a fork in private temporarily so as to not disrupt the main repo and confirm the basic functionality and UX was there. We received really little feedback from other contributors over the years, and always had a strained ability to get people to contribute unless we paid for the work, which honestly is very different from a lot of open source projects we’ve had exposure to.
The site is now live and it is built on top of modern technology, is blazingly fast, and is the first step to be able to deliver on customer requests faster, which was always the aim of the work. The new modern codebase is also now open source which was always part of the plan.
A few highlights of the work done on the site so far:
We’re working our way down the list of issues and feature requests on the Github repo which we can now deliver on much quicker. If you’re a user of the site, we’d love to hear from you about the new site and how we can continue to improve it.
ec2instances.info site with the new updates
Vantage has been certified as being SOC 1 Type 2 compliant in accordance with the standards of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA).
Vantage launches focus.vantage.sh, a free site that converts cloud, AI, and SaaS invoices and cost reports to the FinOps FOCUS format.
Vantage launches cur.vantage.sh, a free guide to AWS billing codes for the FinOps Community.