See the carbon impact of your cloud as you code
Details
- External ID
- 46706668
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- See the carbon impact of your cloud as you code
- Website domain
- infracost.io
- Launched
- Jan. 21, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 67
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.8451910408432147
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
Description
Hey folks, I’m Hassan, one of the co-founders of Infracost (https://www.infracost.io). Infracost helps engineers see and reduce the cloud cost of each infrastructure change before they merge their code. The way Infracost works is we gather pricing data from Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. What we call a ‘Pricing Service’, which now holds around 9 million live price points (!!). Then we map these prices to infrastructure code. Once the mapping is done, it enables us to show the cost impact of a code change before it is merged, directly in GitHub, GitLab etc. Kind of like a checkout-screen for cloud infrastructure.We’ve been building since 2020 (we were part of YC W21 batch), and iterating on the product, building out a team etc. However, back in 2020 one of our users asked if we can also show the carbon impact alongside costs.It has been itching my brain since then. The biggest challenge has always been the carbon data. The mapping of carbon data to infrastructure is time consuming, but it is possible since we’ve done it with cloud costs. But we need the raw carbon data first. The discussions that have happened in the last few years finally led me to a company called Greenpixie in the UK. A few of our existing customers were using them already, so I immediately connected with the founder, John.Greenpixie said they have the data (AHA!!) And their data is verified (ISO-14064 & aligned with the Greenhouse Gas Protocol). As soon as I talked to a few of their customers, I asked my team to see if we can actually finally do this, and build it.My thinking is this: some engineers will care, and some will not (or maybe some will love it and some will hate it!). For those who care, cost and carbon are actually linked; meaning if you reduce the carbon, you usually reduce the cost of the cloud too. It can act as another motivation factor.And now, it is here, and I’d love your feedback. Try it out by going to https://dashboard.infracost.io/, create an account, set up with the GitHub app or GitLab app, and send a pull request with Terraform changes (you can use our example terraform file). It will then show you the cost impact alongside the carbon impact, and how you can optimize it.I’d especially love to hear your feedback on if you think carbon is a big driver for engineers within your teams, or if carbon is a big driver for your company (i.e. is there anything top-down about carbon).AMA - I’ll be monitoring the thread :)Thanks
Enrichment
- Theme
- Vertical
- Energy & climate
- Function
- Observability & eval
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Commercial product
- Normalized one-liner
- carbon tracking for cloud infrastructure
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
No Mapping IaC changes (Terraform/CloudFormation/Pulumi) to cloud carbon emission models requires comprehensive, accurate cloud pricing databases, carbon grid intensity factors per region/provider, and deep parsing of thousands of cloud resource types.
What it would actually take: A production carbon-cost tool needs a custom HCL/AST parser engine integrated into CI/CD, backed by an extensive catalog continuously mapping cloud SKUs to embodied and operational carbon coefficients (using methodologies like Cloud Carbon Footprint or CCF datasets). It requires backend pipelines scraping and normalizing continuously changing provider pricing and regional electricity grid emissions. The hard part is accurately translating abstract infrastructure code definitions into hardware utilization estimates and carbon equivalencies across AWS, Azure, and GCP.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Greenpixie, Boavizta (open source environmental data)
Concerns raised: Cloud pricing is too complicated, indicates a market problem, Carbon metrics don't directly map to cost savings, Different calculation methods yield different results, risk of Goodhart's law, Measuring carbon emissions may not correlate with actual harm reduction, Tool primarily serves virtue signaling rather than real impact
Feature requests: Include electricity and water consumption metrics, Show carbon impact in real-time while gaming/using services, Track impact across multiple cloud providers with accurate SKU mapping
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 33 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #4 of 34 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 42 days after the earliest competitor.
- See the carbon impact of your cloud as you code · hn · 2025-12-16 · 11 upvotes · similarity 1.00
- Cost.dev (YC W21) · hn · 2026-06-04 · 48 upvotes · similarity 0.50
- CloudClerk. We struggled with BigQuery finops, so we decided to fight · hn · 2026-01-23 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- Bill My Cloud, a simple no-nonsense AWS cost estimator · hn · 2025-12-31 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- Atlasphere · hn · 2026-06-09 · 32 upvotes · similarity 0.42
- CloudCent · hn · 2026-05-07 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.40
- CarbonInk · ph · 2026-09-09 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.39
- CloudSlash · hn · 2026-01-05 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.38
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
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