Show HN: Zero Waste Cloud – Finds 20-40% savings in AWS/GCP bills and CO2 impact

8 points

10 months ago

Hey HN! I'm Mike, based in Stockholm/Sweden and I'm the founder of Zero Waste Cloud (https://zerowastecloud.io) - a tool that scans AWS and GCP infrastructure to find cost optimization opportunities while calculating the environmental impact. Almost all businesses can save 20-40% of their cloud costs using this tool (sources at bottom)

TLDR: Sign up -> Connect your AWS/GCP -> Scan -> Save 20-40% of your cloud spend.

My backstory: I've been a CISO and in IT management for a long time and always been frustrated by how much waste I'd find in every environment - idle EC2 instances running 24/7, oversized RDS databases, forgotten storage volumes, test resources that never gets removed. What also bothered me was that nobody was tracking the environmental cost of this waste. Every unused resource burns electricity and contributes to carbon emissions unnecessarily.

What it does:

- Scans AWS accounts using IAM roles or access keys, GCP projects using service account keys

- Identifies specific optimization opportunities: unused EC2/Compute Engine instances, oversized databases, unattached storage, missed reservation opportunities and much more

- Calculates financial savings AND CO₂ reduction for each recommendation using region-specific grid emission factors

- Multi-account/project support

- Generates detailed reports with prioritized recommendations

Technical details: Built with React/TypeScript frontend, Supabase backend. Uses AWS SDK for EC2, RDS, Cost Explorer APIs and GCP's Compute Engine, Cloud SQL, and Cloud Billing APIs. Carbon calculations combine cloud provider PUE data with regional electricity grid emission factors from government sources.

Try it out: The onboarding from creation to your first scan being run is only ~30 seconds. The scanning process is fully automated and typically completes in 5-30 minutes depending on account size of course.

I would genuinely love to get your feedback on it, just came out of beta a few days ago so if there's any bugs around please do let me know =)

If you're on Linkedin let's connect: https://www.linkedin.com/in/almstedt/

Sources:

"companies estimate that 21-50% of their cloud expenditure is wasted" (https://www.techmonitor.ai/hardware/cloud/cloud-waste-hits-b...)

"45% of cloud customer’s expenditures are spent on resources they will never use" (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S22105...)

"21% of enterprise cloud infrastructure spend /.. / in 2025*—is wasted on underutilized resources (https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/44-5-billion-in-inf...)

2 comments