DEV Community: Nada Gul

AWS Data Transfer Billing Charges

Nada Gul — Mon, 25 Jan 2021 15:57:53 +0000

Why AWS data transfer billing surprise users

Data Transfer costs are what AWS charges you to transfer data into or out of AWS. This transfer of data can be between AWS and the Internet and within the AWS cloud. Data transfer charges can surprise AWS users because they might not factor that into their cost of running services, e.g., EC2. They might look at the per hour cost of running an EC2 instance to calculate what their web application will cost them but ignore the data transfer out charges.

One common culprit of escalated transfer costs is an application or service that retrieves a significant amount of data from S3. The requests may not incur a large amount at first, but this can quickly turn into hefty charges eventually. There are other examples of applications with a continuous two-way dialogue with the Internet and disaster recovery services that are regularly copying business-critical data to secondary AWS Regions. Increasing data transfer costs on AWS can be diminished using private IP addresses and the CloudFront CDN service, but these options have their costs.

AWS charges some data transfer types only one-way (either in or out), such as S3. The first GB per month is free and the next 9.999 TB per month costs $0.09 per GB for S3 buckets located in the US West (Oregon) region. On the other hand, if the S3 buckets are in the South America (São Paolo) region, the first GB per month is again free, but the next 9.999 TB per month costs $0.25 per GB. This is how you might end up incurring additional costs to your AWS bill.

Amazon Glacier is a secure and durable data backup and archival facility. It provides various charge options along with a few hidden charges, including deletion. A customer created a lifecycle policy on a bucket that moves files to IA after 30 days and glacier after 60 days. That seemed like an easy task, but what they failed to account for is the request pricing. If you consume 350,000 files on a daily basis without aggregating them, by the end of the month, you would have incurred a cost of 10,248,602 requests (not including the storage costs), and your bill will be around $514.23.

To find out more about surprising ways you pay for AWS Glacier, you can read more in this article about The Surprisingly Many Ways You Pay for Using AWS Glacier.

Another way to cut down data transfer costs on AWS is by creating an infrastructure where data transfers occur within the same Availability Zone or AWS Region wherever possible. This infrastructure should also minimize the number of cross-regional data transfers.

A new AWS user tried using a free Tier EC2 instance as a proxy server for himself just for viewing web pages on the AWS forum page. But when he checked his bill, I saw around 70 GBs of data transfer there. He claimed he had no idea how he incurred this data transfer. Within two weeks, he received nearly 70GB of unknown traffic. The suspicious transfer happened in two days when he used EC2 service only and had 1 EC2 instance running only. His account kept on creating volumes despite setting the default volume to 8GB.

Another user received a $1000 bill because their instance had been compromised. It was implicated in a large-scale Distributed Denial of Service attack. Because of the attack's size, the user was asked to either replace the instance or find the actual compromise and resolve the root cause.

Billgist is a subscription-based service that helps you keep an eye on your daily AWS spending and how it's trending each month. You can choose your alert frequency and add additional recipients as well. The existing AWS billing console is limited because it can only display your costs without notifying you about an eventual surge in the bill. It can also be impractical for most non-technical users to monitor their AWS costs continuously. Billgist allows these reports to be pushed to anyone on the team (e.g., accountant, CFO, someone with financial responsibility) without knowing how to sign in to the AWS console. If you manage client's AWS accounts (like our teams at Foretheta do), Billgist helps you monitor multiple AWS accounts without paying per-seat pricing.

It is essential to examine and understand AWS data transfer costs to avoid unexpected and devastating billing charges. There are many instances where AWS users received surprisingly high amounts of bills and were charged for applications and services they didn't even know they were using. If you're looking for tips on reducing AWS data transfer costs, check our article on Data Transfer Pricing: A Surprising Item on Your AWS Bill.

How to Create AWS Billing Alerts

Nada Gul — Thu, 14 Jan 2021 11:26:28 +0000

Tips on creating AWS billing alerts for your costs

For many software companies and individual users, overspending on AWS becomes a challenge. You're running a few queries, and the next thing you know, you've incurred a hefty sum on your AWS bill depending on the services you used. While Amazon customer service helps issue refunds for a one-time surprise, you need AWS billing alerts to keep these costs in check and prevent a recurrence.

AWS Billing Alerts

You can enable billing alerts to monitor your estimated AWS charges. Choose Billing preferences in the Billing & Cost Management Dashboard. Under Cost Management Preferences, check the box that says Receive Billing Alerts as shown below.

Then you create an alarm that sends an email message when your estimated charges for AWS exceed a specified threshold. When you open the CloudWatch Console, choose Alarms, and then click the Create alarm button in the image below:

Then, choose Select metric and click Next:

Under All metrics, select Billing and then Total Estimated Charge. Check the box next to EstimatedCharges and then choose Select metric. Then you'll be asked to enter an amount to receive a billing alert whenever the total AWS charges for the month exceed that amount. Enter where you want to receive the notification and finally select Create Alarm.

AWS Budgets

Billing alerts are useful for developers or small scale projects with lower costs. Large-scale projects that do not have a fixed budget every month for different AWS services can use AWS Budgets. AWS Budgets enables you to set up custom budgets, keep up with your cost and usage, and receive an alert immediately when it crosses your set threshold.

Choose Budgets in the Billing & Cost Management Dashboard.

Open the AWS Budgets Console and choose Create a budget.

Next, select Cost budget and fill in the Budget details. You can set up to five Alerts for each budget. Finally, click Create to add the budget.

The entire process can be cumbersome to do, especially if you want to alert multiple people at different thresholds. E.g., the development team manager wants to know when it reaches $1,337, but the Finance person wants to know when the amount exceeds $3,000. Moreover, non-technical users may not know how to even sign into the AWS console, much less configure the right alert thresholds. It is a problem because company's usage might grow over time, so the team might continuously be tweaking the threshold value as the usage increases over time.

Billgist

Billgist is a service that will help avoid any nasty surprises from AWS. You can easily catch a surge in your AWS bills without logging into the AWS console every day or nagging your AWS administrator for updates. You can also track changes over time and be aware of the incurred costs of the services created by your development team. You can set up notification preferences depending on your usage and requirements and receive easy to understand snapshots in your inbox.

When you sign into your account on Billgist, move from Dashboard to Notification.

In the Billgist Notification Centre, you can choose to receive Regular Status updates and Threshold Alerts.

For Regular Status updates, you can add multiple users for different AWS integrations and select frequency from daily, weekly or monthly.

Under Regular Status, there is a section of Threshold Alerts. As the name suggests, you add multiple email accounts, pick any or all integrations, select particular AWS services and set an amount for threshold alert. Billgist will notify the added email users when the AWS accounts reach the threshold amount.

AWS billing alerts help you keep track of your costs and prevent from receiving billing surprises in the mail. If you’re looking for simpler snapshots, easy access and more convenient alerts, Billgist’s snapshot reports assist you in keeping up with a sudden increase in your AWS bill and prompt you timely.

Expensive AWS Billing Mistakes

Nada Gul — Mon, 28 Dec 2020 11:46:57 +0000

How are mistakes in AWS so expensive

It is essential to keep track of AWS costs before they start sending you hefty surprise packages in the form of bills. There's not one, not two, not ten, but thousands of stories where people got billed for AWS services unexpectedly. If you've received your first surprise bill of services you meant to turn off or weren't using, AWS might issue a refund or give you credit. But if it's been a couple of times, you might want to read through this article to ensure you don't incur any more expensive bills.

In another article, we discussed at length how you could monitor AWS usage to avoid underutilized resources incurring extra cost. This article will explore various AWS billing mistakes people have made that ended up costing them a lot to ensure you don't make them.

AWS Promotional Credit is an impeccable beginning to diving into AWS. Your credit card may be charged even after you remove it after using resources on AWS. It won't necessarily stop the system from charging you again if you've used up your promotional credit. You might end up with a significant charge on your account despite removing credit card credentials from your AWS account.

Another user on Reddit had a funnier story. He was charged a whopping $61,000 for services he initially claimed he didn’t use. He created a reductant setup of a website with AWS RDS. He later forgot about getting switched to a higher priority task. Bam. He receives a bill of $5,000 first, then $32,000, and finally $24,000.

When choosing your cloud database options, make sure you don't select costly options that you don't need or are entirely unnecessary. A Reddit user got a bill of $670 just by spending half an hour extra in a database running a few queries. Don't wait for a surprise charge in the email; check your options now to opt-out of a potential extra bill. Amazon's impeccable customer service issued a refund to him for the previous month and issued a credit for what he owed the next month.

Keep a close eye on your account usage, set up alerts, or opt for other ways to reduce your AWS bill Five Tips to Reduce Your AWS Bill. If your account gets hacked, ensure that you save all your usage logs before deleting any instances, so you have all your information to log a complaint with your data. Yes, your AWS account is susceptible to unauthorized usage as it is an online platform. But no, don't panic just now because all your focus should be on saving your data, so you have your log history since you made an account. In case your account got hacked, Amazon will most likely be very supportive, but they don't always have to be. So one missed billing alert may end up costing you a lot.

You can avoid these unpleasant surprises by using Billgist. Billgist emails you daily snapshots of your daily spending and how it's trending each month. You can choose your alert frequency and add additional recipients as well. The existing AWS billing console is limited because it can only display your costs without notifying you about an eventual surge in the bill. It can also be impractical for most non-technical users to monitor your AWS costs continuously. Billgist gives you a simple overview of your expenses, delivered daily into your inbox.

Billgist allows these reports to be pushed to anyone on the team (e.g., accountant, CFO, someone with financial responsibility) without knowing how to sign in to the AWS console. If you manage client's AWS accounts (like our teams at Foretheta do), Billgist helps you monitor multiple AWS accounts without paying per-seat pricing.

Surprises can be fun, but not when it's in the form of an unexpected AWS bill surge. People have made many expensive AWS billing mistakes, but following the good practices above will ensure you don't end up being like them.

Five Tips to Reduce Your AWS Bill

Nada Gul — Mon, 21 Dec 2020 13:47:08 +0000

Ways to optimize AWS costs

Since its inception in 2006, Amazon Web Services has grown to dominate the cloud market. AWS offers a variety of services that enables companies, governments and individuals to build complex and scalable applications.

It is important to take control of your AWS bill to plan for future projects and capacity requirements. There are multiple ways of optimizing your cloud costs. You may want to manage your AWS cost to gear up for future spending, or perhaps your customers are depending more on your services, increasing your AWS usage. You don’t want to pay for services you no longer need, or have long running applications that you don’t use anymore. This article will help you learn about ways to optimize your usage depending on your amount of work and consumption rate.

Monitor your costs every day. If you watch them every day, you can stay on top of any surprises that occur. Identifying resources that are low or idle utilization will allow you to delete them before they start incurring extra cost. This may sound like a lot of work. But all you’re doing is glancing at the last day’s usage, making sure that it’s within your expected daily budget. This quick look at your bill will allow you to quickly see if there is an unexpected rise in costs, compared to the last few days.
The AWS trusted advisor is a tool that runs configuration checks to find and prompt you for resources that aren’t being utilized to full capacity. I don’t always find the trusted advisor notifications useful. However, the underutilization alerts for idle hosts and unused disk volumes are the more useful checks. You can quickly scan the list of idle hosts and decide whether you want to delete them or keep them. This is a great way to make sure you’re not paying for unused resources.
Spot instances help lower AWS billing. These permit AWS to assign their unused capacity to users at lower rates, depending on continued availability. Sometimes these resources are available at up to 90% discounted rates than regular prices. Spot instances can be used for fault tolerant or flexible workloads. Be aware that these can be terminated by AWS within just two minutes of a notification. Use them appropriately.
It’s important to regularly clean up resources to optimize cost. This will help to shut down unused instances, especially in development environments around the end of a working day and weekends. It could be every day, or at least every week depending on the kind of business and workload you have. We have a recurring task for our devops team to go through and clean up unused resources. This task gets assigned to a new engineer every sprint, to spread the boring task of following up with potential owners of each resource. It’s time consuming, but effective at keeping your resource usage efficient.
Subscribe to an AWS bill monitoring service. Some of these are: Billgist, Metricly and Yotascale. These services let you keep an eye on your AWS billing expenses. A Reddit user received a bill of $670 just by spending half an hour extra in the database running a few queries. Don’t wait for a surprise in the email, pick a monitoring service to avoid extra charges.

Some of these services are complex and feature rich. Others are fairly simple. Yotascale, for example, seems to be focused on best practices for cost optimization. While Metricly is focused more on EC2 instance cost optimization.

Billgist is based on our own, relatively simpler needs: send an email into the inbox showing us daily spending and how it's trending this month.

We also want the ability to have this report pushed to anyone on the team (e.g. accountant, CFO, someone with financial responsibility) without them needing to know how to sign into the AWS console.

If you manage client's AWS accounts (like our teams at Foretheta do), we want to be able to monitor multiple AWS accounts, without paying per seat pricing.

AWS bills keep on soaring if you lose track of your usage. You end up paying for applications running in the background long after you were done using them. Monitoring utilization every day and enabling a trusted adviser will help keep your AWS usage in check. Using a spot instance, periodically cleaning up resources and pushing AWS billing reports to your inbox will ensure you’re keeping up with the AWS costs that are being incurred.

Setting up push AWS billing reports to your inbox is an easy way to monitor your AWS cost on a daily basis.

The Hidden Cost of AWS Data Transfers

Nada Gul — Mon, 21 Dec 2020 13:22:29 +0000

AWS’s Data Transfer costs and how they can impact you

If you've used AWS, then Amazon must have already charged you for Data Transfer. These costs are what AWS charges to transfer data into or out of AWS. Data transfer could be between AWS and the Internet and within the AWS cloud. If you fail to consider these costs right from the beginning, then you might find yourself with an unpleasant surprise when the bill pops up. In an interview with TechRepublic, “Cloud Economist” Corey Quinn refers to AWS data transfer prices as "cloud's Achilles' heel". According to him, we are still paying 1998 prices for data transfer.

AWS data transfer prices vary for different services and regions. AWS charges you for transferring data into or out of one AWS service to another one. There are charges for transferring data across services within the same region and for transferring it outside the region. So if you were to transfer data across different regions, the cost would be extremely high.

Now you must be wondering how much could these costs even be to be writing an entire article about it? Well, that thought is justified. Large-scale multinational companies end up paying a million dollars a month. But that's not it. There are relatively small-scale startups that suffer fees close to a million. There are data transfers to and from AWS services that cost more than others. So, the cost of transferring data, say, OUT from EC2 to the Internet, ends up accumulating substantially.

Let's take an example of data transfer fees for the AWS storage platform S3. For S3 buckets situated in the US West (Oregon) region, the first GB/month incurs no cost and the next 9.999 TB/month costs $0.09 per GB. But if the S3 buckets are in the South America (São Paolo) region, the first GB/month is still free, but the next 9.999 TB/month costs $0.25 per GB.

Tips on how to reduce data transfer costs

While you might not want to focus entirely on completely cutting down your AWS transfer costs, but you might want to reduce them sensibly by following the steps below:

Control data volumes by limiting the size of data transfers by using storage efficiencies with a data management platform.
Keep all traffic within a region, if you can. And in case of traffic leaving the region, pick the lowest transfer rate region depending on your business's needs.
All traffic is free within the same AZ and the same VPC, using AWS Private IPs. So, make sure your resources are in the same AZ and the same VPC, using private IPs when possible.
Dedicated NAT devices incur a rate per GB on top of the applicable data transfer out rates, so try avoiding these. Utilize the VPC Internet Gateway NAT functionality instead and assign these instances public IPs. You can also utilize VPC endpoints.
Across the board, there are higher data transfer costs with public IP or Elastic IP addresses as compared to a private address. Using private IP addresses frequently reduce costs drastically.
Opt for billing alarms by subscribing to an AWS bill monitoring service. These include Billgist, Metricly, and Yotascale. These monitoring services let you keep an eye on your AWS billing expenses.
Choose Amazon CloudFront to transfer data out to Internet users. Up to 50TB of data transferred out to the Internet will be less expensive from Amazon CloudFront than transferring out from AWS regions and with less latency.
There are some distinguishing pricing principles for the following services, so you need to ensure that you double-check these: Amazon Neptune, Amazon MSK (Managed Kafka), Amazon CloudSearch, Amazon ElastiCache, Amazon ElasticSearch.

Data transferring fees might end up being an unpleasant surprise on your AWS bill. Amazon might charge you differently for transferring data into and out of your AWS database, depending on the source and destination. So, it's a good idea to follow the tips mentioned above to ensure you aren't spending, in terms of resources and money, more than you require.

You can read more on how to spot a surge in overall AWS cost in How to Monitor AWS Costs.

How to Monitor AWS Costs

Nada Gul — Thu, 03 Dec 2020 07:54:10 +0000

Ways to monitor your AWS costs and usage

Amazon Web Services is currently dominating the cloud market. They provide a multitude of services, and it’s easy to lose track of everything you are running. Which is why it’s important to take control of your bill. You may want to manage your AWS costs to keep track of your future spending. Perhaps you’ve increased your AWS usage because customers are depending more on your services. Continue reading to learn about ways to monitor your AWS cost.

Keep a check on your AWS utilization every day. Doing so will allow you to stay on top of any surprises that may occur. Identifying resources that are low or idle utilization will let you delete them before they start incurring extra costs. A quick glance at your bill will help you spot any surge in costs in the last few days.

There are several monitoring tools you can use to keep track of your AWS cost.

Amazon CloudWatch is a metrics repository that gives you a view of different AWS resources, services and applications running on AWS and on-premise servers. It lets you monitor application performance, operational issues and constraints, and resource consumption. Users are able to keep operations in order and fix any technical issues. CloudWatch is commonly used with instances of Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and of Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS). It also oversees volumes of Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) and Elastic Load Balancers (ELBs), and can also go on to take custom data from external sources.
AWS Trusted Advisor provides real time instruction so you can follow AWS best practices by provisioning your resources. You can also integrate it with the CloudWatch to discover and respond to any changes in the Trusted Advisor status checks. Trusted Advisor can remove unused and idle resources. It checks your service limits to improve service performance and improves application security. Trusted Advisor also checks for service limits (more than 80% of usage), however, it does take up to 24 hours for any changes to show.
AWS Cost Explorer allows you to see and manage your AWS costs and usage over time. You can set a custom time period depending on how often you’d like to view your data. It forecasts future costs and usage, and allows you to save your progress.
Billgist gives a simple overview of your cost into your inbox daily. The current AWS billing console is limited because it only displays your costs without notifying you about a surge in the bill. Continuously monitoring costs daily can be a little cumbersome for most non-technical users Billgist allows you to easily catch a sudden rise in AWS bills. You don’t have to log into AWS console every day or nag your AWS administrator for updates. Billgist tracks changes over time and be aware of the incurred costs of the services created by your development team.

We talked about how to keep a check on your AWS utilization every day. Identifying resources that are low or idle will let you delete them before they start incurring extra cost. There are several monitoring tools you can use to keep track of your AWS cost. The cloud can be customizable and user-friendly. It can also be cost-effective, especially after implementing an easy-to-use cost monitoring tool.

Google Patent Search

Nada Gul — Thu, 03 Dec 2020 07:19:31 +0000

A patent search is a tool to check the patentability of your invention. You can find out if someone else has already come up with the same idea. And if there is a patent similar to your invention, your patent application won’t be accepted. All the hard work, time, and money you invested in the invention will go to waste. It is important that you do a thorough patent search before proceeding with your invention.

There are many options to pick from when searching for patents. In this article, we will talk about Google Patent Search in detail. Google Patent Search engine is free and has an easy-to-use interface. The Google search engine is quite fast, as opposed to the United States Patent and Trademark Office’s online library. Google Patents also provides information on legal events for patents.
How to search on Google Patents

Google Patents has two search interfaces. A simple search interface and an advanced search interface. As the name suggests, the simple search interface is quite simple to use and very similar to the regular Google search engine.

You may enter your query in the search bar on the main search page, a publication number of a particular patent you’re looking for, or an application number. When I entered “chemical reaction” in the search bar, I got 135,160 results in just 3 seconds. That’s fairly quick.

In the advanced search interface, you can use boolean syntax to search for patents. You can also search for patent publications using Cooperative Patent Classifications (CPCs) that represent ideas instead of keywords.

The AND operator is used to include all words entered in the search bar to be present in search results. The OR operator is used for at least one of the words to be present in search results. When entering terms, it is important to note that all terms are automatically ANDed together, and synonyms are ORed. You can add a synonym by pressing TAB and a new search term by pressing ENTER. You can also use proximity operators NEAR, WITH, SAME, AJD.

On the Advanced Search page and under Search Fields, there’s an option to search for patents using particular fields. You can select before or after the filing date and choose either priority, filing, or publication for the date or date range you entered. There’s an option to search using an inventor and/or assignee. This option helps users look for patent documents by a particular inventor or patents filed by a specific person or company.

The last box on the advanced search page includes the patent office, in case you want to search for patent documents by country. The next option is the language. You can choose to specify status: grant or application, and type: patent or design. The last option is litigation, where you can choose one of the two options: “has related litigation” or “no known litigation”.

Specifying the patent search using the search field options narrows the search results to the most relevant patent publications you are looking for. It helps to make your patent search experience more efficient.

Patent searching is an essential part of your patent process. You can also learn about recent inventions, the development of particular technologies or patents of famous academics. Google Patent search is a user-friendly patent search engine that makes the complex process of patent searching less tedious. It’s free and fast.

If you want to learn about other avenues for patent searching, check our article on Patent Search here.

Patent Search

Nada Gul — Thu, 12 Nov 2020 10:51:40 +0000

How to conduct a patent search

A patent search helps evaluate the patentability of your invention. It lets you know if somebody else has already come up with the same idea or similar. If there's an existing patent for your invention, the patent offices will reject your patent, and all the time and money you invested in it will go to waste.

Patent search may get a little overwhelming, which is why this article will help and make this daunting task easier for you.

If you're new to patent searching, let's understand why you might find it helpful. If you have an idea for an invention, a patent search will help you familiarize yourself with previous patents to understand your invention's patentability. Understanding patentability enables you to avoid costly decisions. Patent search may also allow you to improve your existing patent application or your invention itself while avoiding copying someone else's idea.

Besides building up on your idea for an invention, you might want to conduct a patent search to find out about recent inventions. It might assist you in studying the development of a particular technology you are interested in. You can also find patents by famous academics, perhaps for your research, or maybe if you are just keen on learning about their work.

Now that we've discussed what patent search is and how it might help you, let's move on to the process of a patent search itself. There are multiple ways to conduct a patent search. We have made a list of four patent search methods we have used in the past and found useful:

1. United States Patent and Trademark Office

The United States Patent and Trademark Office, or the USPTO, has an extensive library with multiple patent resources. There are Full-Text Patents from 1976 and PDF Image Patents starting from 1790. There is also a Full Text and Image Database for patent applications.

There are three ways of searching Full Text patents: Quick Search, Advanced Search, and Patent Number Search.

In Quick Search, you enter the terms along with fields to search for patents. Although the process was very slow, I got 848557 hits with 1 through 50 on the first page when I searched for chemical (Term 1) and reaction (Term 2). The boolean operator here being "and". You can choose the boolean operator when you enter terms to search: "and", "or" and "andnot". You can easily move to the next page by clicking "Next 50 hits", or enter a number you want to jump to in the box next to "Jump To".

In Advanced Search, you have the option to enter multiple terms with appropriate boolean operators in different fields. The Patent Number Search allows you to search for patents using patent numbers.

2. Google Patent Search

Google Patents works the same as the Google search engine but catalogs patents and patent applications. Over the years, it has expanded to cover the European Patent Office, World Intellectual Property Organization, among other Intellectual Property organizations worldwide. It has global litigation information showing litigation history for patents anywhere in the world. Google Patent Search engine is a lot faster than the USPTO in showing results.

3. IFI Claims Patent Services

IFI Claims Patent Services is another platform to search for global patent information if you have a subscription. Google Patents also use the IFI Claims patent database. You cannot search for patents on their publicly available website. However, the IFI Claims service provides an API service built on top of a SOLR index. The full documentation of their search API endpoint is available here.

4. Traindex

Traindex is a search service for corporate datasets powered by machine learning. Specifically, it is a semantic text similarity service served as an Application Programming Interface (API). Traindex applies a model on patents extracted from "Google public patents data" and serves it as an API that your applications can consume.

You can use the Traindex search widget here to search for patents. Type your query in the space provided, as shown in the image below. You can choose one of the two indices: Google Patents or Wikipedia (the two active indices) and hit the search button. It was fairly quick and gave me 99 results for my query, "chemical reaction", along with the score for each link.

For more information on Traindex, check out the link here.

Patentability search is essential if you need to submit a patent application or have an idea for an invention and want to ensure someone else hasn't come up with the same or similar idea. It is also helpful if you want to find out about recent inventions or are interested in the development of particular technologies or want to find patents of famous academics. There are various routes to search for patents, including the USPTO, Google Patent Search, IFI claims, and Traindex.

Hopefully, this article gave you an insight into how to search for patents. But if you have any questions regarding patent searching, send us an email at blog@foretheta.com.

Why Should You Opt for a Custom Software Development Company?

Nada Gul — Mon, 09 Nov 2020 11:20:53 +0000

Why choosing a custom software development company will boost your business

A majority of business owners need in-house resources to build software for their company. If they lack the required resources, they need to pick the right software company for custom-built software. Custom-built software helps companies streamline their work process. This article will discuss in detail why you might want to choose a custom software development company for your business.

Custom software development companies develop tailor-made solutions to match the specific needs and requirements of your business. Such software aligns with your company's structure, system, and workflow since they are designed especially for you.

Let's dig deeper into how a custom software development company can help you streamline your process and reduce costs in the long run by improving the overall efficiency of your company.

Personalization

A set of available features in a generic system might not suit your needs. Or you might only be using six out of the ten available features, but you're still paying for the other four. A custom software development company will design the software just for you to help you accomplish your objectives.

Scalability

As your business grows, you might require extra features or applications to streamline your process. Having custom software will allow you to scale the existing system to accommodate your business growth. You don't want to restrict your business by a generic custom software designed years ago to meet the business's needs back then. On the other hand, a personalized system can grow along with the business needs without getting complicated.

Business Integration

Custom software allows you to integrate multiple programs within the system, all simultaneously connected. The software company you choose will design custom software especially to interoperate with your existing system. It will also help you increase efficiency since you won't have to spend time trying to find and use off-the-shelf software. You won't have to keep adapting your business processes to software; instead, the software will continue to adapt to your business processes as they evolve over time.

Cost-effectiveness

An off-the-shelf solution might seem cost-effective at first. However, it ends up costing much more in the long run. You end up paying extra for additional features you didn't even need. With custom software, you won't be paying for extra functions that don't satisfy your business requirements. Moreover, you may upgrade existing features as the business grows, allowing for a higher budget allocation for software development.

Technical Support

Off-the-shelf software may provide you with technical support, but you're likely to end up waiting in a long queue only to find a bot at the other end. Contrariwise, a custom software development company's support team, would provide you with in-depth technical support and regular maintenance. Hence, the operational process becomes smooth as the custom software development company you opted for will ensure all issues are resolved efficiently in a timely manner.

Security

Custom software is likely to be more secure than a mainstream one. Your system would be more vulnerable to external threats with off-the-shelf software since such software is developed for a wider audience. Intellectual property and personal data will be more secure using custom-built software.

Efficiency

By helping a business with technical support, business integration, scalability, and personalization, custom software is ultimately going to increase your company's efficiency. Spending time integrating your workflow to a standard software is bound to affect the company's efficiency and productivity. Thus, increased efficiency is one of the prime advantages of custom software. Automating manual operations using custom software will also boost the company's efficiency.

A custom-built software enables business owners to streamline their process, expand in scale and/or size, and raise the business value. A custom software development company helps you personalize the software, scale it as your business expands, integrate it with the business, improve security and efficiency, and provide technical support while being cost-effective.

If you're considering hiring a software development company, check our guide Choosing the Right Software Development Company to help you pick the right fit for your business.

For custom software development companies in Seattle, check Top Custom Software Development Companies in Seattle. For New York, check Top Custom Software Development Companies in New York.

Product Managers and the Jobs to be Done Framework

Nada Gul — Mon, 02 Nov 2020 14:03:24 +0000

The Jobs to be Done Framework and how it can be implemented to help product managers

Most customers don’t care about the product itself. They are more interested in what a product helps them do or achieve. Failing to align the product to the customer’s needs leads to a failed product or service.

As a product manager or owner, you are responsible for delivering winning products. Product managers or owners might have to go through a long process of product vision, lifecycle, customer requirements, and engineering to deliver winning products. The entire process can easily be a wasted effort if a product fails to meet customers’ goals.

This article will discuss What the Jobs to be Done framework is and How it can be implemented to help product managers and owners deliver the right product.

What?

In his book, Competing Against Luck, Clay Christensen insists on discovering what jobs consumers are trying to get done by hiring their product. According to him, product managers ought to recognize why consumers choose what they do to progress in their respective lives; what job consumers are hiring a product to do.

How?

Jobs to be Done is a framework that helps companies understand that consumers are real humans with a vision, and to advance towards that vision, they need to buy your product. This theory establishes a real connection between producers and consumers; producers empathize with them and facilitate them in overcoming obstacles in life. This framework helps product managers understand the jobs their customers want to get done. Let’s look at how PayPal, LinkedIn, and Yolt apply the Jobs to be Done framework.

PayPal

PayPal Commerce Platform is the biggest online payment system in the world. The service helps consumers around the world pay for goods and services simply and securely. According to the CEO, Dan Schulman, PayPal gives its customers a feeling of “trust and security”. The customer feeling element connects to Jobs to be Done framework’s emotional aspect, making customers human and helping them feel secure by providing the service.

Linkedin is a widely used, employment-oriented online platform that allows professionals worldwide to connect. They also provide a paid premium service with extra features. When you sign up for the premium service, you can send messages to hiring managers, industry leaders, peers, or potential partners. It also lets you see who viewed your profile. LinkedIn has LinkedIn Learning courses that only premium members can access to promote their personal or company profiles.

When you opt for the premium service, LinkedIn provides options that do not describe the product, but an array of jobs you want LinkedIn to do for you:

LinkedIn knows you’re signing up to get a job done and assures you that they’ll help you get it done. LinkedIn Premium has multiple plans for consumers, which they segment using Jobs to be Done by creating a product for each job/plan.

Yolt

Yolt is an app that helps customers view various bank accounts and see how much they are spending. It also gives them a breakdown and insight on where they are spending it. Yolt helps the customer get the job done; the job to be cautious about how they are spending their money. The app allows them to achieve this by enabling users to pay bills, create budgets, or save for the future. The banks are still working in the background.

Product failure is a big concern for product managers. Using the Jobs to be Done framework will help products and their managers succeed because of humanizing the products and focusing on providing a solution for customers’ jobs. Implementing the framework will ensure product innovation meets customer requirements to stay relevant and afloat in this rapidly evolving market.