About
One person, one cloud, one job.
CostWarden is built and run by one engineer, from Chile, for teams that have nobody whose job is the AWS bill. It is pre-pilot: feature-complete, with no customers yet — which this site says wherever it matters.
Why this exists.
There is no horror story here. I am an SRE, and keeping infrastructure running and its costs down is what I do for a living — clusters, process automation, and consumption alerts wired up through Datadog, Grafana and Cloudability. When spend moves, I am one of the people it reaches.
That job is where this came from. Not from one bad invoice, but from noticing the same thing over and over: what decides whether a cost problem is expensive is how fast somebody finds out. Everything after that — which service, what caused it, what to resize — is the easy part. And the tooling that makes you find out fast is priced for companies that already employ someone like me to run it.
That is the gap. A team of five has neither the tooling nor the person, and no team that size should be slow to see where its money is going, or have to decide what to optimise without knowing what it is paying for. So I built the version I would want them to have: one provider, done properly, delivered as a message rather than as another dashboard nobody opens.
The refusal that cost me the most is the one about customers. I want to know the people who use this — it is most of why I built it — and a wall of invented logos would be starting that relationship with a lie. So the page you are reading says there are none yet. I will know it was worth doing when somebody writes to say thank you. Not a metric. A thank you.
Where the product actually stands.
Not a roadmap. The state of the thing, as of today, in the terms you would use to check it.
Stage
Pre-pilot
Feature-complete. No customers yet, which is why there are no testimonials anywhere on this site.
Team
1
One engineer, from Chile. Support, billing questions and bug reports all reach the same person.
Clouds supported
AWS only
Not a stage on the way to more. Cost semantics do not transfer between providers.
Four things it will not do.
Every one is written down in the codebase as a decision with a reason, not left as a gap to fill later. A small product stays useful by refusing things.
It will never have write access
The IAM role grants 5 read actions and will stay that way. Automatic remediation would need exactly the permission that makes this request easy to approve — a tool that can terminate your instances is a much larger thing to trust than one that tells you which to look at.
It will not become multi-cloud
AWS only, and there is no plan. A shallow second integration would make the first one worse, and cost semantics genuinely do not carry across providers.
The cheap plan is not the crippled one
Every band gets every feature. The team least able to absorb a limited tool is the one paying least, so nothing is withheld to manufacture an upgrade — the band decides your price and nothing else.
It will not pretend to have customers
No testimonials, no logo wall, no invented user counts until there is a real pilot to quote. The proof on this site is the kind you can check: named IAM actions, published thresholds, and arithmetic that holds.
Three rules this site is held to.
You are the kind of reader who checks. These are the constraints that make checking worth your time.
Every figure is computed, never typed
The amounts in the example detection all derive from one 30-day series: the baseline is a median, the delta is observed minus baseline, the percentage is the delta over it. Check the arithmetic and it holds.
one source · nothing entered twice
One accent, and it means one thing
Amber marks spend that broke from its normal, and nothing else — not a heading, not a border for decoration. A second accent would teach you nothing by the time you reached the real alarm.
--signal anomaly only
Thresholds are published, not implied
The detector ships with one configuration and it is public, down to the dollar floor and the z-score — the four numbers below are read from it, not restated. A threshold you cannot see is a threshold you cannot argue with.
z 3.5 · +40% · $10 · 1%
You will be talking to the person who wrote it.
There is no support tier and no first-line queue. If something is wrong, the reply comes from the one person who can fix it — which is the only genuine advantage of a product this small.
Operated from Chile. CostWarden is the name it contracts under until the company is constituted.