[HN Gopher] Show HN: An MCP server for understanding AWS costs
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       Show HN: An MCP server for understanding AWS costs
        
       Hey all - I work at Vantage, a FinOps platform.  I know AI is peak
       hype right now. But it has definitely changed some of our dev
       workflows already. So we wanted to find a way to let our customers
       experiment with how they can use AI to make their cloud cost
       management work more productive.  The MCP Server acts as a
       connector between LLMs (right now only Claude, Cursor support it
       but ChatGPT and Google Gemini coming soon) and your cost and usage
       data on Vantage which supports 20+ cloud infra providers including
       AWS, Datadog, Mongo, etc. (You have to have a Vantage account to
       use it since it's using the Vantage API)  Video demo:
       https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0VP2NlUvRU  Repo:
       https://github.com/vantage-sh/vantage-mcp-server  It's really
       impressive how capable the latest-gen models are with an MCP server
       and an API. So far we have found it useful for:  Ad-Hoc questions:
       "What's our non-prod cloud spend per engineer if we have 25
       engineers"  Action plans: "Find unallocated spend and look for
       clues how it should be tagged"  Multi-tool workflows: "Find recent
       cost spikes that look like they could have come from eng changes
       and look for GitHub PR's merged around the same time" (using it in
       combination with the GitHub MCP)  Thought I'd share, let me know if
       you have questions.
        
       Author : StratusBen
       Score  : 14 points
       Date   : 2025-04-25 14:43 UTC (4 days ago)
        
       | cat-whisperer wrote:
       | This is going to different, as resources end up getting
       | intertwined? or is there a way to standardize it?
        
       | andrenotgiant wrote:
       | What's the difference between connecting an LLM to the data
       | through Vantage vs directly to the AWS cost and usage API's?
        
         | StratusBen wrote:
         | A few things.
         | 
         | The biggest is giving the LLM context. On Vantage we have a
         | primitive called a "Cost Report" that you can think of as being
         | a set of filters. So you can create a cost report for a
         | particular environment (production vs staging) or by service
         | (front-end service vs back-end service). When you ask questions
         | to the LLM, it will take the context into account versus just
         | looking at all of the raw usage in your account.
         | 
         | Most of our customers will create these filters, define
         | reports, and organize them into folders and the LLM takes that
         | context into account which can be helpful for asking questions.
         | 
         | Lastly, we support more providers beyond AWS so if you wanted
         | to merge in other associated costs like Datadog, Temporal,
         | Clickhouse, etc.
        
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       (page generated 2025-04-29 23:00 UTC)