Top all-time · #3321
Duckbill
Company blog · duckbillgroup.com/blogbusinesseconomics
Duckbill is the company blog at duckbillgroup.com, writing about business and economics. Since 2020, 22 different Hacker News readers have linked it 34 times, most often “A Duck Tale”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-02-28, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (18) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Duckbill's pages and blog for AWS cost analysis and cloud bill reduction. Its published EC2 spend estimates are cited as sources, and the firm is often named as a place to get help.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 18 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
We provide financial planning and analysis for enterprise infrastructure to help you understand, negotiate, and optimize your cloud spend.
Most-linked posts?
- /6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2020-07-11
- A Duck Tale3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2021-02-04
- /careers/2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2020-03-23
- Figma's $300k Daily AWS Bill Isn't the Scandal You Think It Is2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-07-11
- AWS Cost Allocation Guide: Tagging Best Practices2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-09-23
What Hacker News says?
Are you familiar with https://www.duckbillgroup.com/careers/ ? Might suit you.
Comment linking /careers/
on “Ask HN: Who wants to be hired right now?”Submitted Show HN: A simple storage pricing calculator for AWS as a story · 169 points
HN discussionI would put the estimate of "server lying on the ground" at more like tens of billions of dollars. Here's how I back in my math: 1. AWS is a $44 billion run-rate business. 2. This estimate from the Duckbill group has EC2 at 60% of the AWS bills of "large accounts". https://www.duckbillgroup.com/products/public-cloud-analysis... 3. I used to work in EC2 Networking and looked at the graphs with the server counts for a…
Comment linking /products/public-cloud-analysis/
on “Is a billion dollars worth of server lying on the ground?”Submitted Figma's $300k Daily AWS Bill Isn't the Scandal You Think It Is as a story · 14 points
HN discussionDuckbill engineering is hiring a full-time ONSITE full-stack senior SWE in downtown San Francisco. We WFH Tuesdays and Thursdays. We're tackling the hardest finops challenges for the biggest enterprise customers head-on and have a killer team along with the advantage of the established and industry-leading DuckBill Group. Help shape the leading edge of an entire industry with us while we're still just at seed stage…
Comment linking /careers/
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (September 2025)”Submitted Figma's $300k Daily AWS Bill Isn't the Scandal You Think It Is as a story · 12 points
HN discussionIt is crystal clear that this comment validates the misunderstanding of how bandwidth is priced in the real world and how, just because Amazon's price model has been reliable, that it must be a viable cost because people pay it. It's unfortunate that the reality you're basing this comment on is so far off base that you've convinced yourself AWS egress fees are somehow "stable". It's also very interesting that you're…
Comment linking /
on “AWS free tier data transfer expansion”Submitted RDS Reserved Instances: Where Did All the New Instance Types Go? as a story · 9 points
HN discussionDuckbill engineering is hiring a full-time ONSITE senior data engineer in downtown San Francisco. We WFH Tuesdays and Thursdays. We're tackling the hardest finops challenges for the biggest enterprise customers head-on and have a killer team along with the advantage of the established and industry-leading DuckBill Group. Help shape the leading edge of an entire industry with us while we're still just at seed stage a…
Comment linking /careers/
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (October 2025)”Submitted EC2 Reserved Instances Are Being Deprecated as a story · 3 points
HN discussionInter-zone traffic is $0.01/GB EACH WAY. So in effect it's $0.02/GB https://www.duckbillgroup.com/blog/aws-cross-az-data-transfe...
Comment linking /blog/aws-cross-az-data-transfer-costs-more-than-aws-says/
on “AWS costs every programmer should know (2019)”Submitted AWS Cost Allocation Guide: Tagging Best Practices as a story · 3 points
HN discussionYeah, it's really just a way to talk through cloud architectural choices when you're designing for cost: committing to reserved instances for VMs (goodbye, eternal soul -- for at least the next three years), minimizing your data retention or migrating through storage classes for bucket data, and ruthlessly optimizing your use of per-usage services (bucket ops, API calls, serverless functions, and charge-per-op datab…
Comment linking /wp-content/uploads/2019/12/dbg010-datatxfr-infographic-20191219.jpg
on “Popular Patreon creators are being hit with Vimeo price hikes”Submitted The Duckbill Guide to AWS Reserved Instances as a story · 2 points
HN discussionLike https://www.duckbillgroup.com/about/ ? There’s probably room in the market.
Comment linking /about/
on “Cutting down AWS cost by $150k per year simply by shutting things off”Submitted Get a first pass at reducing your AWS bill as a story · 2 points
HN discussionNot on the page I get: https://www.duckbillgroup.com/aws-super-simple-storage-calcu...
Comment linking /aws-super-simple-storage-calculator/?storage=3&units=20®ion=uswest2&submitButton=Compare+Storage+Costs
on “Show HN: A simple storage pricing calculator for AWS”Submitted A Duck Tale as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThis is neat. https://www.duckbillgroup.com/aws-super-simple-storage-calcu... is a way to show "how much more expensive is X than S3"?
Comment linking /aws-super-simple-storage-calculator/?storage=1000&units=10®ion=useast1&submitButton=Compare+Storage+Costs
on “Show HN: A simple storage pricing calculator for AWS”Submitted AWS Fixes Its Free Tier Problem – Duckbill as a story · 1 points
HN discussionLots of comments with tips on “how”, but your last paragraph makes it sound like your are looking for a “who”. I’ve heard good things about https://www.duckbillgroup.com/
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: How can I quickly trim my AWS bill?”Submitted New AWS SaaS Marketplace Rules Will Impact Your Commitments as a story · 1 points
HN discussionHowdy. I have loud and angry thoughts about this; https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/ has a bunch of pieces, some of which may be more relevant than others. The slightly-more-serious corporate side of the house is at https://www.duckbillgroup.com/blog/ , if you can stomach a slight decline in platypus.
Comment linking /blog/
on “Ask HN: How can I quickly trim my AWS bill?”Submitted The Duckbill Guide to AWS Savings Plans as a story · 1 points
HN discussionHe's not a victim - he mostly benefits from them. He runs https://www.duckbillgroup.com/
Comment linking /
on “AWS’s Anti-Competitive Move Hidden in Plain Sight”Submitted AWS Cost Allocation Guide: Tagging Best Practices (2021) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionAre you talking a spend of over a million a month? You need a private pricing agreement. Call the duckbill group. https://www.duckbillgroup.com/ No affiliation.
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: How do you control your inflating AWS bill?”Submitted A Simple, yet Effective Cost Optimization Framework as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThere is definitely demand and folks are willing to pay: https://www.duckbillgroup.com/ https://www.vantage.sh/
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Would you pay for a service that reduces your cloud costs?”Submitted A Duck Tale as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
