About

Frugally began life as CloudSiren back in 2020. During the initial stages of the pandemic every company out there was scrambling to put as much as possible as fast as possible in the cloud as all their employees were suddenly working from home.

Having been on this journey and lived through the pain we realised that it was often the little things that either took the most time or got completely overlooked. So we came up with the idea for a SaaS platform that took all those small annoying jobs you come across when and did them automatically. Things like automatically setting up alarms, spinning up bastion servers, costing alerts etc. Thus CloudSiren was born.

Unfortunately we never finished it, we got too bogged down in the technical side of things as often happens with startups and ran out of steam. In the meantime, companies were desperately trying to save money during the pandemic. After combing over our AWS bill we realised that we could save thousands of dollars by turning off all our development, staging, QA etc environments when they weren’t in use. For some services this was easy, AWS has schedules built right in, for others we had to write custom code.

This worked, and had a huge impact on the bill, but wasn’t perfect. Daylight savings, Engineers wanting to work evenings/weekends, new services not automatically being picked up etc etc were all issues. So that’s when we had the idea of picking up CloudSiren again and changing it to be a Slack App that solves all these issues and saves money on your AWS bill.

…and thus, three years later in 2023, Frugally was born.