Case study · SaaS
Cutting AWS spend by 64% for a Series B SaaS
The challenge
A Series B SaaS company had grown its AWS bill from $35k to $180k per month in 18 months — far ahead of revenue growth. Engineering had no visibility into per-workload cost, and the CFO needed a credible plan before the next board meeting.
What we did
We ran a two-week cost audit, then executed a 10-week optimization sprint. The audit produced a tagging schema, per-team cost dashboards, and a prioritized list of 23 changes. The sprint shipped 19 of them, including right-sizing, Spot migration for batch workloads, S3 lifecycle policies, RDS instance family changes, and a multi-account chargeback model.
Results
64%
spend reduction
From $180k/mo to $65k/mo within 90 days, sustained for the following two quarters.
$1.4M
annualized savings
Net of the engagement cost and ongoing FinOps tooling.
23
changes shipped
Across compute, storage, networking, and observability.
0
customer-facing incidents
All changes shipped behind feature flags and canary rollouts.
"They turned a CFO emergency into a board-ready story in 12 weeks. The dashboards alone changed how engineering thinks about cost."