The Problem

The adoption of cloud computing is skyrocketing, driven primarily by the increasing need for scalability and flexibility. However, with the many benefits the cloud offers, there is a problem that plagues businesses of all sizes—the complexity of managing cloud spend effectively.

The features that make the cloud appealing—scalability, flexibility, and availability—have led to cost inefficiencies and budgetary complexities. The dynamic nature of the cloud, where resources can be scaled, provisioned, and deprovisioned on-demand, results in a constantly changing infrastructure. As a result, gaining an accurate insight into cloud spend requires constant monitoring and optimization: it’s hard to shoot a moving target.

The traditional approach to managing cloud spend, which typically involves manual assessment conducted on a quarterly basis, falls short in the face of this new infrastructure paradigm. The infrequent nature of cost reassessments leads to delayed insights and missed opportunities. As a result, businesses are left trying to balance the benefits of the cloud while controlling costs effectively.

The Opportunity

With current market conditions, in the face of uncertain economic landscapes and unpredictable futures, companies are more determined than ever to cut expenses and streamline operations. This has largely manifested itself through employee layoffs, office closures, and other drastic measures. For example, Facebook has called 2023 its “year of efficiency,” cutting thousands of jobs; and TechCrunch reported that over 168,243 tech workers have been laid off since the start of the year.

We contend that there is a much easier and overlooked target for cost reduction—cloud spend. As alluded to above, cloud optimization is currently a manual process. While it serves as a massive capital unlock, the process takes significant time and effort to pay off. However, imagine the possibilities if the process could be automated. Simply flip a switch and consistently maximize savings on your cloud bill. Companies could unlock hundreds of thousands or even millions in savings without sacrificing on resources that drive growth and innovation.

The Solution

That’s why we created Antimetal, an AI-powered cloud cost optimization platform changing the way businesses manage cloud costs.

The heart of Antimetal is our powerful AI engine. It continuously analyzes and monitors your cloud usage, resource configuration, and spend metrics to identify savings opportunities in real-time. We’ve developed machine learning algorithms that adapt and learn from your unique usage patterns. As you continue to use Antimetal, our recommendations become increasingly personalized to your behavior. For example, if you run an e-commerce business, we’d quickly learn that you spin up many more servers according to seasonal peak, and we’d provide recommendations for additional savings infrastructure precisely when you need it most.

One of the key distinguishing features of Antimetal is our deep understanding of risk and our commitment to mitigating it for all parties involved. Many of our cost savings recommendations are centered around AWS Reserved Instances (RIs), which offer significant discounts of up to 75% for long-term commitments to specific instances. However, many businesses hesitate to take advantage of these RIs due to the difficulty in forecasting future cloud spend and usage, and they’re notoriously difficult to exit.

To address this issue, we created a secondary marketplace. If a RI recommended by Antimetal ever goes underutilized we take a two-step approach. First, we try to transfer it to another Antimetal user that requires it. If that doesn’t work we list it on the AWS RI Marketplace and provide you a credit. In the latter case, we’ve used online machine learning algorithms that constantly monitor the velocity of the AWS Marketplace, enabling your instance to sell as quickly as possible. During our private beta, we measured that this approach has reduced sell time by more than 3x.

Antimetal was built with a clear purpose: to help businesses cut costs. We understand that no one wants to pay for more SaaS fees, which is why we’ve developed a fair, transparent pricing model that aligns our interests with customer success. Our pricing model is completely performance-based: we only charge 10% of the savings we directly generate. Additionally, we know this time hits hardest for startups, and that’s why we offer Antimetal completely free for one year to qualifying startups.

The Future

We believe that there will be a fundamental shift in how people think about the cloud and cloud costs. Initially, many companies embraced the cloud during the last bull market, where there was a lot of pressure to scale quickly and capture the market, often at the expense of cost-effectiveness. Cloud providers offered substantial credits to promote cloud migration, which only put cloud costs lower on the priority list. However, the current market landscape has triggered a paradigm shift, with companies now prioritizing cutting costs and extending their runway.

This change signifies a new era for cloud costs, where individuals and companies are going to be increasingly cost-conscious when it comes to building in the cloud. In light of this, tools like Antimetal are only going to grow in importance in the coming years.

Looking ahead, our roadmap at Antimetal aligns with this evolving perspective. Currently, we provide solutions for EC2 compute on AWS, which represents the lion’s share of usage. However, our future plans include expanding support to a wide range of other AWS services, including RDS, ElastiCache, Lambda, and many more. After that, we aim to extend our offerings to additional cloud providers such as GCP and Azure.

In addition, we realize large enterprises face unique challenges when it comes to cloud cost optimization. They negotiate multi-year contracts with cloud providers, establishing minimum spend limits and thresholds. We’re currently working on a suite of tools and features tailored to assist enterprises in effectively managing their cloud costs and contracts.

We’re excited for the months ahead, and can’t wait to share what we’re working on with you.

It’s time to cut cloud costs, not headcount.