Mid-market SaaS: AWS cost reduction
Illustrative composite · no named client · metrics typical of patterns we work in
Restructured the cloud setup so spend is owned per product line, paired with right-sized compute and automatic scaling against real demand. Zero customer-facing impact during the migration.
Problem
A mid-market SaaS running 80+ microservices in a single sprawling AWS account had no cost-attribution model. Bills were creeping past $90k/month with no clear way to allocate spend to product lines.
Idle dev environments ran 24/7. Production over-provisioned by 40% based on peak-of-peak guesswork. A mix of legacy Reserved Instances and untargeted Savings Plans no longer matched the workload mix.
Approach
Split the monolithic AWS account into per-product-line accounts under a single AWS Org, with cost-and-usage exports rolling up to a central FinOps account.
Migrated production EKS clusters to Karpenter-driven autoscaling with mixed spot/on-demand. Dev environments scheduled to scale to zero overnight.
Rebuilt the Terraform module library with cost-tag enforcement at module boundaries. Services without an `owner` and `cost-center` tag fail `terraform plan`.
Outcome
Tech
"The first month after the cutover, finance asked us to double-check the bill. They didn't trust it. We did the math three times. The bill was right."
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