SaaS Platform: 34% Cloud Cost Reduction Without Performance Trade-offs

The Challenge

A fast-growing SaaS platform had scaled its AWS footprint aggressively to keep pace with customer growth, but engineering leadership had lost visibility into why costs were rising faster than revenue. Monthly cloud spend had grown 3x over eighteen months with no corresponding cost allocation model, so no one could say with confidence which product lines or teams were driving the increase.

The engineering team suspected waste — overprovisioned instances, orphaned resources, inefficient storage tiers — but had neither the bandwidth nor the specialised FinOps expertise to investigate systematically without pulling engineers off customer-facing roadmap work.

Our Approach

We started with a two-week baseline assessment before recommending a single change: a full inventory of the cloud estate, cost allocation by service and team, and a documented register of waste and rightsizing candidates. No optimisation action was taken until this baseline was reviewed and agreed with engineering leadership.

• Designed and implemented a tagging strategy that gave engineering and finance teams real-time cost visibility by product line for the first time
• Identified and eliminated idle and orphaned resources, including unattached storage volumes and non-production environments left running around the clock
• Rightsized over 60 compute instances based on actual utilisation data, with each change risk-classified and validated against historical performance before implementation
• Restructured Reserved Instance and Savings Plan coverage to match actual usage patterns rather than ad hoc historical purchases
• Delivered a governance framework — budgets, alerts, and a monthly review cadence — so the savings would hold after our engagement ended

The Results

Within ninety days, the platform achieved a validated 34% reduction in monthly cloud spend, with zero degradation in application performance or reliability — every rightsizing change was tested against production traffic patterns before being finalised. The governance framework we put in place has kept spend flat as the platform has continued to scale.

• 34% reduction in monthly cloud spend, fully validated against usage data
• Zero performance degradation from any rightsizing or optimisation action
• Full cost allocation visibility by product line and team, for the first time
• Governance framework sustaining savings well past engagement close