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. Every evening our dev and staging environments stopped automatically and started again the next morning.

Then IBM acquired them.

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

Some teams 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 far too big for the problem. Most teams, like ours, just go back to running everything all the time.

The problem was real

That stuck with me. IBM doesn’t buy a company unless there’s something worth buying, and what was worth buying here was a fairly ordinary job: stop paying for compute nobody is using overnight.

Building it myself

So 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 isn’t complicated. 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. You connect your AWS account, set a schedule, and stop paying for idle resources.

I was the customer first

I had the problem. I used the tool that fixed it. I lost access when the price changed. Now I’m building the version I wish still existed, which at least means I know exactly who it’s for.