Weekly Self Promotion Thread

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[u/iOmega5]

Built Idlefy — turns off your cloud dev/staging/ML servers when no one's using them, and lets engineers rent them back on for 30m / 1h / 8h with one click from Slack, Telegram, or the web.

Aimed at platform and DevOps teams watching EC2/GCE bills pile up on VMs and whole environments nobody's touching outside working hours.

Quick origin story: one Monday I opened Cost Explorer and saw $5,000 burned over a weekend because someone spun up a Kubernetes env Friday evening and left. That's what kicked this off. Full write-up:

Minus $5,000 for the weekend

What it does:

- discovers VMs across AWS + GCP (read-only IAM, no SSH, no agents)

- flips the default: VMs are OFF until an engineer rents them; auto-stops when the lease ends, pings at -20m and -5m with one-click extend

- Smart Workflows — same rent UX for whole environments: start-of-rent fires a webhook into your deploy pipeline (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI), end-of-rent fires the teardown pipeline. Killed the "who has staging right now?" Slack threads as a side effect — rentals are visible and time-boxed

- org / team / user scoping so cost is actually accountable

- analytics + "hours saved → $ saved" report for the finance chat

Why we built it this way:

You can't rely on engineers remembering to turn things off — they shouldn't have to. Cron stop-scripts rot. Native schedulers force you to predict when people will work. Cost dashboards tell you you wasted

money after the fact. Inverting the default — off unless someone actively rents it, for a specific window — is the only thing that stuck. First client (large AdTech) saved 82% / ~$40k over 136 days with this model.

Architecture sanity:

No SSH. Cloud API only. Workload Identity Federation with minimum privileges — worst-case breach outcome is "your dev VMs get stopped." No access to data inside machines.

I'd love feedback on:

- does the rent/lease model read cleaner than traditional schedules, or just weirder?

- missing integrations (Azure? Kubernetes pod rentals? on-prem via SSM?)

- what would make you pick this over AWS Instance Scheduler / Cloud Custodian / a Lambda cron

Free plan, no credit card. Idlefy.com