Show HN: Cost.dev (YC W21) – making agents cost-aware and cheaper to call
Not a pilot. Infracost just shipped Cost.dev—a CLI that cuts Claude's token usage 79% by making agents cost-aware when writing infrastructure code.
Why it matters
As coding agents move into production infrastructure work, the economics of agent-to-API calls become mission-critical. Cost.dev solves the token bloat problem by offloading deterministic work (price lookups, static analysis) from the LLM to a local CLI, reducing both cost and hallucination risk in IaC workflows.
The key facts
6 to knowClaude output token usage reduced up to 79% vs. bare-Claude baseline
API cost reduction up to 67%
Supports Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Windsurf, OpenAI Codex, Gemini CLI, and IDEs (VS Code, JetBrains)
Runs locally—code never leaves the machine
Static analysis + vendor price feeds passed to agent to prevent hallucination on ~10M AWS/Azure/GCP price points
Built by Infracost team (YC W21), who shipped Infracost CLI 5 years ago for FinOps shift-left
Go to the source
Hacker Newscost.dev
Publisher excerpt: We launched Infracost on HN five years ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26064588) where our CLI generated cost estimates for infra-as-code, e.g. "this Terraform PR adds $400/mo". The idea was to shift cloud costs (FinOps) left, so engineers get visibility of costs before deployment and…