Hacker News with Generative AI: Cost Optimization

The Era of Solopreneurs Is Here (manidoraisamy.com)
DeepSeek just dropped a bombshell: $200M in annual revenue with a 500%+ profit margin—all while charging 25x less than OpenAI. But DeepSeek didn’t just build another AI model. They wrote their own parallel file system (3FS) to optimize costs—something that would have been unthinkable for a company of their size. This was possible because AI helped write the file system. Now, imagine what will happen in a couple of years—AI will be writing code, optimizing infrastructure, and even debugging itself.

Startup, Artificial Intelligence, Business Models, Revenue, Cost Optimization

76 points by QueensGambit 6 days ago | 100 comments

AI companies race to use 'distillation' to produce cheaper models (ft.com)

Artificial Intelligence, Generative AI, Machine Learning, Cost Optimization

6 points by marban 6 days ago | 1 comments

Why it's so hard to build a jet engine (construction-physics.com)
Civilization's toughest technical challenges are those that require extraordinary (and constantly improving) performance to be delivered at a low cost.

Engineering, Technology, Design, Cost Optimization

443 points by mhb 8 days ago | 208 comments

Escaping surprise bills and over-engineered messes: Why I left AWS (travisbumgarner.dev)
I love building side projects. They've been a way to push myself and explore new ideas and technologies. Each site has needed hosting. I started my hosting journey with WordPress. I moved on to raw Linux servers and finally ended up on AWS. Hosting on AWS felt like a badge of honor, but it also felt like a ticking time bomb of complexity and cost.

Cloud Computing, Web Development, Personal Experiences, Cost Optimization

129 points by theogravity 33 days ago | 155 comments

Reduce your LLM agent costs by 90% with structure-preserving HTML compression (github.com/emmetify)
Cut your LLM processing costs by up to 90% by transforming verbose HTML into efficient Emmet notation, without losing structural integrity.

Cost Optimization, HTML, Web Development, Data Compression

13 points by maledorak 40 days ago | 10 comments

How DeepSeek trained at 1/30 the price (twitter.com)

Machine Learning, Cost Optimization, Deep Learning

11 points by maxlin 40 days ago | 0 comments

DeepSeek Outpaced OpenAI at 3% of the Cost (venturebeat.com)
DeepSeek R1’s Monday release has sent shockwaves through the AI community, disrupting assumptions about what’s required to achieve cutting-edge AI performance.

Artificial Intelligence, Generative AI, Cost Optimization, OpenAI, Deep Learning

4 points by jhunter1016 41 days ago | 0 comments

The Guide to AWS Lambda Cost Optimization (cloudyali.io)

Cloud Computing, AWS, Cost Optimization

3 points by heldsteel7 47 days ago | 1 comments

Ask HN: Cheapest way to run a time-series database in cloud? (ycombinator.com)
I need to run a database (preferably Postgres-based, currently using TimescaleDB) to store about 20M rows of price data per day, with the option to discard or offload data after 7d to cold storage.

Cloud Computing, Databases, Cost Optimization

12 points by cedws 49 days ago | 12 comments

Show HN: QwQ-32B APIs – o1 like reasoning at 1% the cost (ycombinator.com)

AI, Open Source, Cost Optimization

17 points by ozgune 52 days ago | 3 comments

How we saved millions on AWS (forter.com)
In early 2022, as the world was emerging from the Covid-19 pandemic, inflation surged to multi-decade highs, prompting central banks to raise interest rates.

Cloud Computing, AWS, Cost Optimization, Business

44 points by omervk 61 days ago | 8 comments

PR Previews Don't Need Vercel: My Solution on a $5 VPS (pert.dev)
Let's preface this by admitting that the title is a little farcical - the fact that Vercel and other similar sites give you preview domains out of the box with no setup is a lovely feature. This blog is purely to show you that it's actually possible to configure these yourself, and furthermore, it's way easier than you might think!

Web Development, Serverless, Cost Optimization

21 points by pure-orange 68 days ago | 0 comments

Using AZs can eat up your budget – From Prometheus to VictoriaMetrics (prezi.com)
By 2024, Prezi’s monitoring system, built around Prometheus, was becoming outdated. It was already 5+ years old, running on a deprecated internal platform and accumulating a significant amount of costs every month.

Monitoring, Cost Optimization, Open Source, Cloud Computing, Prometheus

71 points by shscs911 73 days ago | 58 comments

Scalable Server SQLite Apps (servicestack.net)
Ever since adding support for Litestream in our project's templates GitHub Action Deployments we've been using SQLite as the backend for our new .NET C# Apps as it's the most cost-effective option that frees us from needing to use a cloud managed database which lets us make use of Hetzner's much cheaper US Cloud VMs.

.NET, Databases, Cloud Computing, Cost Optimization, Software Development

5 points by mythz 95 days ago | 0 comments

Kubernetes on Hetzner: cutting my infra bill by 75% (bilbof.com)

Kubernetes, Cloud Computing, Cost Optimization, Infrastructure

375 points by BillFranklin 97 days ago | 221 comments

Migrating a Client onto OpenTofu for Cost and Speed [video] (youtube.com)

Cloud Computing, Open Source, Cost Optimization, Video Content, Migration

12 points by mooreds 101 days ago | 0 comments

Cutting AWS costs through inference infrastructure improvements (vannevarlabs.com)
Vannevar Labs, a defense tech startup, successfully cut machine learning (ML) inference costs by 45% using Ray and Karpenter on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS).

Machine Learning, Cloud Computing, Cost Optimization, Kubernetes

7 points by vannevarlabs 107 days ago | 0 comments

Delivering 15TB of 4K video with Cloudflare R2 for $2.18 (screencasting.com)
We serve a lot of video. In fact, just last month, our viewers watched over 15 terabytes of it—and with several new courses planned, our monthly bandwidth will more than double next year.

Video Streaming, Cloud Storage, Cost Optimization

70 points by peter_d_sherman 112 days ago | 14 comments

Show HN: Costco for LLM Tokens (inference.net)
inference.net is a wholesaler of LLM inference tokens for models like Llama 3.1. We provide real-time and batch inference APIs at a 50-90% discount from what you would pay together.ai or groq. If you're spending > $10K/month on inference, we can likely reduce your costs substantially. You can reach us at support@inference.net.

Generative AI, Cloud Computing, Cost Optimization

6 points by funfunfunction 129 days ago | 0 comments

Tell HN: Switched from Lightsail to Hetzner Cloud, 2 blogs for $4 a month (ycombinator.com)
After a few comments mentioned I was probably wasting money using AWS Lightsail, I finally tried out Hetzner Cloud for hosting my Ghost Blogs.

Web Hosting, Cloud Computing, Cost Optimization, Ghost CMS

11 points by 999900000999 133 days ago | 26 comments

Own Infrastructure Instead of AWS: Significantly Lower Costs, No Hidden Fees (heise.de)
37signals aims to save just under two million US dollars a year by moving out of the cloud and back into its own data center – significantly more than the initially targeted seven million dollars over five years.

Cloud Computing, Cost Optimization, Data Centers, Infrastructure, 37signals

5 points by leastangle 135 days ago | 0 comments

Video scraping: extracting JSON from a 35s screen capture for 1/10th of a cent (simonwillison.net)
The other day I found myself needing to add up some numeric values that were scattered across twelve different emails.

Web Scraping, Data Extraction, Automation, Cost Optimization, Efficiency

309 points by simonw 143 days ago | 46 comments

Audioscrape: Building in Rust When Everyone Said I Shouldn't (ycombinator.com)
I'm excited to share my journey of bootstrapping Audioscrape, a podcast exploration platform, built entirely in Rust. Despite conventional wisdom suggesting RoR, Python, or TypeScript for rapid MVP development, I chose Rust to challenge myself technically and optimize for low operational costs. The result? A performant application running on a $7/month VM, demonstrating that you can launch lean and scale efficiently.

Rust, Web Development, Startups, Cost Optimization, Performance

90 points by lukaesch 152 days ago | 45 comments

Scalable Server SQLite Apps (servicestack.net)
Ever since adding support for Litestream in our project's templates GitHub Action Deployments we've been using SQLite as the backend for our new .NET Apps as it's the most cost-effective option that frees us from needing to use a cloud managed database which lets us make use of Hetzner's much cheaper US Cloud VMs.

.NET, Databases, Cloud Computing, Cost Optimization

5 points by mythz 163 days ago | 1 comments

Ask HN: Cheap way to run a small newsletter? (ycombinator.com)
For a newsletter of around 1,500 subscribers mailchimp wants £34 a month.

Newsletters, Email Marketing, Startups, Cost Optimization

14 points by tombot 166 days ago | 25 comments

Saving $10k/Month on Analytics – Snowplow Serverless Alternative (agondata.com)
Faced with the high costs of traditional analytics solutions, our team implemented a serverless Snowplow alternative to dramatically reduce costs. By leveraging cloud-native technologies and serverless architectures, we not only achieved significant cost savings but also gained a scalable, flexible analytics platform with full data ownership.

Cloud Computing, Analytics, Cost Optimization, Serverless

14 points by edgecto 169 days ago | 5 comments

Show HN: Keep Your Next Viral AI App Free for Longer with Local Embeddings (fxn.ai)
Whether you’re a solopreneur building an intelligent search app; or you’re a series A startup finding product-market fit in enterprise knowledge management; you can be saving 60% or more on your monthly OpenAI bills by generating embeddings on your users’ devices.

OpenAI, AI, Cost Optimization, Machine Learning, Software

7 points by olokobayusuf 170 days ago | 0 comments

Reclaim the Stack (reclaim-the-stack.com)
We spent 7 months building a Kubernetes based platform to replace Heroku for our SaaS product at mynewsdesk.com. **The results were a 90% reduction in costs and a 30% improvement in performance.** We also significantly improved developer experience with reduced deploy times and faster / more accessible tooling.

Kubernetes, SaaS, Cloud Computing, Cost Optimization, Developer Experience

496 points by dustedcodes 181 days ago | 321 comments

Set Up a $4/Mo Hetzner VM to Skip the Serverless Tax (shipixen.com)

Cloud Computing, Serverless, Cost Optimization, Virtual Machines, Hetzner

89 points by tosh 189 days ago | 86 comments

Our renewal bill for Datadog came to –$83,000/year before we canceled (twitter.com)

Cloud Services, Datadog, Cost Optimization

47 points by lopkeny12ko 194 days ago | 51 comments