Illustrative example. This case study describes a typical engagement of this kind, not a specific client. Figures are representative of the work, not a guarantee of results.
Cloud and DevOps · SaaS
AWS bill cut by 38% in one quarter for a B2B software company
An 80-person software company's AWS bill had grown faster than its revenue, releases depended on one engineer, and an enterprise prospect was asking hard questions. One quarter later the bill was down by more than a third and the platform was in code.
Results
Compared with the three months before the engagement.
The problem
The platform had been built quickly by the founding engineers in a single AWS account. Six years later the bill was $42,000 a month, nobody was confident what half the resources did, and switching anything off felt risky.
Releases were manual and happened weekly at best, coordinated by one senior engineer. Everyone had administrator access.
A large enterprise prospect had sent a security questionnaire asking about access control, disaster recovery and change management, and the deal was waiting on the answers.
What we did
A one-week review, then eight weeks of fixes and foundations.
Week 1: Review
With read-only access, we identified 31 savings opportunities and 12 risks, each with a dollar figure or a severity rating. The top ten savings accounted for most of the potential reduction.
Weeks 2–3: Quick savings
Right-sized databases and containers, moved workloads to Graviton processors, scheduled non-production environments to switch off overnight, and replaced costly NAT gateway traffic with VPC endpoints.
Weeks 4–9: Foundations
Brought the infrastructure under Terraform, split production and non-production into separate accounts with single sign-on, built CI/CD pipelines with automatic rollback, and bought Savings Plans for the steady baseline.
Handover
Runbooks, a recovery test, recorded walkthroughs and a quarterly cost review the team now runs themselves.
Stack
What made the difference
Doing the savings first built trust. Once the bill visibly dropped in the second week, the team was happy to invest time in the foundations.
Putting the infrastructure in code was as much about the security review as about speed. Most questionnaire answers became a link to a reviewed, version-controlled configuration.
Commitments like Savings Plans came last, after right-sizing, so the company committed only to what it actually needed.