Show HN: Beacon (open source) – Built after AWS billed me 700% more for RDS(beaconinfra.dev)
beaconinfra.dev
Show HN: Beacon (open source) – Built after AWS billed me 700% more for RDS
https://beaconinfra.dev
1 comments
This is a great example of how unpredictable AWS billing can derail projects. I've seen this exact scenario play out at multiple companies - sudden 700%+ cost spikes that force engineering teams to become billing experts instead of building product.
A few learnings from teams I've worked with who faced similar issues:
1. RDS cost surprises often come from I/O charges that aren't obvious upfront. Moving to reserved instances helps, but doesn't solve sudden usage spikes.
2. The "build your own monitoring" approach works but has hidden costs - engineer time, maintenance, alert fatigue, etc.
3. Many teams find that automated cloud optimization platforms (like CloudExpat, Spot.io, or CAST AI) can reduce costs 60-90% without the engineering overhead.
For anyone spending $10k+/month on AWS/Azure/GCP, it's usually worth getting a free cost analysis. Even if you don't use a platform, they'll often reveal billing patterns you didn't know existed.
Your Beacon project looks solid for self-hosters though - great work turning a painful experience into something useful!
A few learnings from teams I've worked with who faced similar issues:
1. RDS cost surprises often come from I/O charges that aren't obvious upfront. Moving to reserved instances helps, but doesn't solve sudden usage spikes.
2. The "build your own monitoring" approach works but has hidden costs - engineer time, maintenance, alert fatigue, etc.
3. Many teams find that automated cloud optimization platforms (like CloudExpat, Spot.io, or CAST AI) can reduce costs 60-90% without the engineering overhead.
For anyone spending $10k+/month on AWS/Azure/GCP, it's usually worth getting a free cost analysis. Even if you don't use a platform, they'll often reveal billing patterns you didn't know existed.
Your Beacon project looks solid for self-hosters though - great work turning a painful experience into something useful!
No DDoS, no misconfiguration, nothing unusual. I logged into the root account to look at the billing page, and there it was:RDS PostgreSQL legacy fee ~€200 because I did not upgrade to Postgres 16 (from 13).
I was baffled. I paid monthly €25 (27% tax included) for the smallest RDS instance, then I see this monster fee for something I think should cost maybe €2. I mean AWS just has to run it in a different environment. For €200 I could buy them a new server to run it for me.
That's when I had the realization: "I have a spare Raspberry Pi 3, I'll just host everything on that. That will be for free." But self-hosting came with it's own challenges, especially on a resource-constrained device. I needed better tools to deploy and monitor my application. SSH-ing into the Raspberry Pi every time I wanted to deploy a newer version was a pain in the ass. So was debugging issues. Existing deployment and monitoring solutions were either too expensive, too complex, or didn't work well with resource-constrained devices like Raspberry Pi. Examples: * Grafana/Prometheus for monitoring: Over-engineered for my needs. * OpenSearch/ELK for logs: A nightmare on low-resource devices. * Metabase for dashboards: A ram hungry monster that eats up more resources than if I hosted 100 applications. And to access the db remotely opening a port and putting it behind Cloudflare Zero Trust is much easier than setting up Metabase.
So I decided to build my own deployment and montitoring agent, and why not make it opensource? The agent can currently deploy applications from github by polling release tags, monitor device metrics, alert when thresholds are reached, forward logs to cloud dashboard. It's still in development, with features improving every week. If you are interested, give it a start on Github.