In February 2020, we began building what would become DuckTools, a new AWS cost management SaaS tool, modeled off of our extensive internal tools we b

A Duck Tale - The Duckbill Group

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2021-09-23 12:30:12

In February 2020, we began building what would become DuckTools, a new AWS cost management SaaS tool, modeled off of our extensive internal tools we built for our consulting projects. We launched to the world in private beta in December 2020.

The Duckbill Group, being a highly technical consultancy, had built and contracted a number of clever scripts and apps to help us deliver on our mission: lowering the horrifying AWS bill. While our Cloud Economists are able to help almost any company reduce their bill, our consulting services are often not cost-effective for a company with, say, $50k/month in AWS spend.

That got us thinking: What if we turned our internal tools into a public product so we could help people our consulting services weren’t a fit for? We could expand our market, help more people, build a passive revenue stream, and perhaps even create an upsell path to our consulting services.

We knew we couldn’t compete directly with existing cloud tools built by large teams with their mountains of venture funding—nor did we want to. Our vision was a set of small, focused tools to help people answer very specific questions—like “what Savings Plan should I buy,” “which DynamoDB capacity model is best for this workload,” or “where’s all this Lambda spend coming from and what can I do about it?”