LeftSize vs Steampipe and Powerpipe Thrifty mods
Turbot's AWS Thrifty and Azure Thrifty mods are open-source benchmarks that query your accounts with Steampipe and show unused and under-used resources in a Powerpipe dashboard or your terminal. LeftSize runs a larger rule set, including retirements, security and governance, as a scheduled GitHub Action and turns the results into GitHub or Jira issues with savings estimates and fix steps.
Last checked against Steampipe Thrifty mods's documentation in October 2026.
| LeftSize | Steampipe Thrifty mods | |
|---|---|---|
| Rules | 217 rules (98 AWS, 93 Azure, 26 Cloudflare): 81 cost, 75 retirement and end of support, 40 security, 21 governance | AWS Thrifty: 56 cost controls; Azure Thrifty: 18 cost controls |
| Where findings go | GitHub or Jira issues per rule and scope, with resources, estimated monthly savings and fix steps | A Powerpipe dashboard or terminal output from each run |
| Setup and hosting | A GitHub Action in your own workflow; read-only access through OIDC (AWS, Azure) or an API token (Cloudflare) | Install Steampipe with the AWS or Azure plugin and Powerpipe, then run the benchmarks yourself, locally or in your own pipeline |
| Retirements and end of support | 75 rules with dates for retiring services, VM sizes and versions | A few related checks, such as older EC2 instance generations and unsupported RDS versions |
| Workflow | @leftsize commands in the issue: explain, howto, script, snooze, ignore, wrong; issues update on every scan | Results per run; tracking and follow-up are up to you |
| Licence and price | Scanning action MIT-licensed. Free: 81 cost rules, 3 repositories; Team $79/month; Business $249/month | Free. Mods under Apache-2.0; Steampipe and Powerpipe under AGPL-3.0 |
Where Steampipe Thrifty mods is the better choice
- Free and open source, and every control is a SQL query you can read and change.
- Steampipe can query far more than cost: hundreds of tables across clouds and SaaS, for your own ad-hoc questions.
- Thresholds are variables you can tune per run.
What LeftSize adds
- Runs on a schedule and keeps one issue per problem up to date, so findings are tracked instead of re-read after every run.
- A broader rule set, including 75 retirement and end-of-support rules with deadlines.
- Estimated monthly savings per resource and fix scripts in the issue.
- Nothing to install or keep up to date beyond the workflow file.
Using them together
Use Steampipe for ad-hoc questions about your cloud, and LeftSize for the daily, tracked list of waste and retirements your team works through.