Cost.dev (YC W21) – making agents cost-aware and cheaper to call

These founders have been watching cloud costs roll up for five years via their Infracost tool—but lately the traffic looking like bots, and it clicked: coding agents are calling their CLI to estimate how much a task will cost to run. Now Cost.dev is building for exactly that use case, which is genuinely clever positioning when every AI demo looks sexy and nobody's talking about the metered bill.

They've got a window into real agent usage patterns most founders would kill for, and the YC W21 batch cred doesn't hurt either. The take: every company's rushing to ship autonomous agents, but the infrastructure underneath meters by the second—Cost.dev is betting someone needs to watch the meter. That's the kind of unsexy infrastructure play that actually prints money.