Filling out questionnaires is definitely painful but reviewing them can be as well. Are you guys planning on building any tooling to make the review process for teams onboarding vendors easier?
We're currently experimenting with pricing (charging retainer or SaaS fees for advanced/ongoing analysis) but think we can keep referrals vendor-agnostic by standardizing referral rates and aligning incentives in a way where we get a small percentage over a long time period of usage. We're trying to optimize for long-term satisfaction and usage of a product so only want to be rewarded when we can fulfill that.
Also we'll always give a transparent reason for why each vendor was recommended or excluded based on your use case requirements (this vendor doesn't fit your compliance or cost requirements, this vendor has low average ease-of-use rating and you said ease of use was a high priority for you, etc).
In terms of keeping track of every product, feature, release - it's currently being done in a combination of monitoring tools for public docs, websites, and releases and in some cases we will directly communicate with the vendor to validate. In the future we're hoping to create a system of record whether that's an API or interface so vendors can push information to us directly (which we will then vet for accuracy) to keep things accurate and up to date. Eventually we want to help standardize terminology, and potentially even standardize some benchmarks so developers can view features and performance in a more uniform way.
I have never met any SaaS where it wasn't cumbersome to figure out the competitors, the differences and the pricing.
I think the greatest area that a small company could use help in is learning which tools are out there i.e. answering this very question. For instance, one firm I know had no idea how useful bill.com was and it saved them 10s of manhours per week but began using it years after it was offered.
The other area is workflow: you use software X and software Y in this way, but did you know most other companies link them up with software Z in the middle and it works much better, so long as you check the box that reminds you to tag the invoices (or whatever).
>The other area is workflow: you use software X and software Y in this way, but did you know most other companies link them up with software Z in the middle and it works much better, so long as you check the box that reminds you to tag the invoices (or whatever).
I think adding up all the time savings for certain workflows or integrations across different sets of products would be immensely useful. You're totally right there's no easy way to see that currently anywhere.
It would be valuable just to tell people what others are using. The most popular configurations would lead to suggestions based on usage in the field.
This is sort of the reason people check out state of Javascript and learn that "everyone else" is gravitating towards Vue, or that Svelte is gaining in popularity, or that VS code is everyone's preferred editor.
Not the GP and have been out of the game a bit but CRM products were a nightmare the few times I had to select one. Security products are tricky as well.
Hey, we're Jason, LV and Todd. We're tired of Cost Explorer and overpaying on the AWS bill. You know, "Bill Shock".
Beyond the "agency" issue all cloud providers obviously bring, there are still some major problems with cloud billing that are largely unsolved by the market. Here are some that I think are more important than ever and that we want to solve:
- There is a gap in billing information (waiting days makes a difference when you're deploying constantly)
- It takes too much dev time to dissect a cost report and get key info
- Available cost alerting is mostly threshold-based and super noisy (you also have to set it up)
- I can't see how decisions I make impact cloud costs
- The big cloud management platforms are complex to set up / good for enterprises, suck for startups
- It takes a long time to go from insight to action
We launched Tim today to address this:
[1] https://www.producthunt.com/posts/tim-4
It's simple (yet effective, and you can go deeper) AWS cost management developers really like using. We have many cloud-native companies of decent scale using it and we want to solve the aforementioned problems.
What do you think is most painful with AWS billing? If it matters enough, we'll build it.
I'm one of the founders of https://taloflow.ai (the company tied to the blog post above). We built Tim (taloflow infra monitor) to save endless hours going through spreadsheets or Cost Explorer. We built it as real-time dataflow with visualizations on Grafana so you can correlate events such as deployments to how your costs change. We also built a model that predicts your real-time costs inferred from infrastructure metrics that aren't available through Cost Explorer.
Our tool is free for any devs spending less than 60K a year on AWS. Let me know if you wanna test it out!
