cloudonaut

It’s embarrassing, but we made a classic mistake when designing the pricing model for our virus and malware scan API. The entry-level price was far too low. Find out how a simple trick led to 42% month-on-month growth, a lower churn rate and fewer support tickets. Additionally, find out how we replaced our newsletter provider, Kit, with a bespoke solution comprising SES, Lambda, Aurora DSQL and Step Functions. And if that’s not enough, we’ll also be sharing our struggles with tax compliance on the AWS Marketplace, as well as our thoughts on Aurora DSQL and a shift in the SaaS market.

Stephen Kuenzli, founder of k9 Security, joins us to talk about his journey from AWS consultant to SaaS builder — and why IAM is still the hardest part of cloud security. We dig into practical advice for achieving least privilege, how to deal with the flood of security alerts from tools like AWS Security Hub and Wiz, and why your team's attention budget matters more than fixing every finding. Plus, Stephen plays a quick-fire round rating Security Hub controls as "critical" or "distraction."

In this episode, Andreas introduces his long-time friend Thorsten Höger, with whom he shares a history going back to school and later working together on an AWS-powered online banking platform. Thorsten has spent over 10 years helping SMB customers in regulated industries build compliant AWS infrastructures, specializing in networking, security, Serverless, and CDK. He talks about his current consulting work and his upcoming product Deploymon. A major topic is the AWS European Sovereign Cloud (EUSC), where Andreas shares a field report and the hosts debate whether EUSC is genuine sovereignty or just "sovereign washing" given concerns around the US Cloud Act. They also discuss how small businesses can benefit from AI tools. Andreas uses AI to review blog posts, find bugs, and update dependencies, while Thorsten relies on it for customer offers, software development, planning, and research.

Michael shares a trick to reduce AWS Config costs for volatile workloads. Andreas talks about EC2 instance families and their availability in the different AWS regions. On top of that, the Wittig brothers share insights into their work and business.

This episode covers a month of record growth and strategic shifts, celebrating new customer wins and diving into our marketing strategies. We share project updates, including bucketAV's multi-engine scan, and highlight key AWS topics: simplified AMI deletion and generating SDKs for API Gateway. Tune in for insights, wins, and fails!