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The User

Cloud Cost Autopilot is built for small business owners and startup founders who run infrastructure on AWS but don't have a dedicated cloud engineer watching their bill.

Who You Are

You're running a small team and your company relies on AWS to host your application. You pay an AWS bill every month and it's higher than you'd like, but you don't have the time or expertise to dig into why. You've heard terms like EC2, CloudWatch, and IAM, but managing cloud costs isn't your job. Building your product is.

This is exactly the situation my stakeholder had. His startup runs 35 to 40 EC2 instances across development, staging, and production environments. Dev instances get left running over weekends when no one is using them, and his team only audits the bill when it looks unusually high. By then, money has already been wasted.

What You Get

Cloud Cost Autopilot connects to your AWS account securely, scans all your EC2 instances, and tells you exactly how much money you're wasting in dollars rather than technical metrics. You don't need to understand CPU utilization or CloudWatch. You just see a clear number.

"You have 5 idle EC2 instances. You could save $42.35 per month by stopping them."

Each recommendation shows the instance ID, its average CPU usage over the last 7 days, and the estimated monthly savings if you stop it. You can mark recommendations as applied when you take action, or dismiss ones you want to keep running for other reasons.

How It Works

1
You create an IAM role in your AWS account with read-only permissions and provide Cloud Cost Autopilot with the role ARN. This is a secure way to grant access without sharing your actual credentials.
2
The system assumes the IAM role, receives temporary credentials valid for one hour, and scans all EC2 instances in your account using the AWS SDK.
3
For each instance, it pulls 7 days of CPU utilization data from CloudWatch and calculates the average. Any instance averaging below 5% CPU is flagged as idle.
4
The dashboard displays every idle instance alongside its estimated monthly savings, calculated from real AWS on-demand pricing for each instance type.
5
You review the list and decide what to do. Marking a recommendation as applied means you've stopped the instance. Dismissing it means you want to keep it running.

Why It Matters

A single forgotten t2.micro running 24 hours a day costs about $8.47 a month. That sounds small on its own, but a startup with 10 idle dev instances is quietly wasting over $100 a month without realizing it. Cloud Cost Autopilot makes that waste visible and actionable in minutes rather than requiring a manual audit that most small teams never get around to doing.