Why I'm Building ParkMyAWS

3 years ago we saved thousands by shutting down AWS servers overnight.

The tool we used was ParkMyCloud. It worked perfectly. Every evening our dev and staging environments stopped automatically and started again the next morning. No wasted compute.

Then IBM acquired them.

The price jumped. We cancelled. And like most teams, we slowly went back to the bad habit — servers running 24/7.

The waste was quiet, but it was there.

Some teams try to solve this with custom Lambda functions or homegrown scripts, but those need maintenance and someone to own them. Others look at enterprise tools that are overkill for the problem. Most teams, like ours, just go back to running everything 24/7.

The problem was real

That moment stuck with me though. IBM doesn’t acquire a company unless the problem is real. There’s clearly demand for a tool that helps teams stop paying for compute nobody is using overnight.

Building it myself

Fast forward to now. I’m building a simpler version.

After my two kids go to sleep I usually get about 90 minutes at the laptop, somewhere between 9:30 and 11pm. That’s when ParkMyAWS gets built.

The idea is simple: automatically stop and start EC2 and RDS instances on a schedule so you’re not paying for compute nobody is using overnight.

No complex dashboards. No enterprise sales process. Just connect your AWS account, set a schedule, and stop paying for idle resources.

I was the customer first

I experienced the problem firsthand. I used the tool that solved it. I watched it become inaccessible after an acquisition. And now I’m building the version I wish still existed.

Sometimes the best product ideas come from being the frustrated user first.