Case Study: How We Reduced a SaaS Startup's Cloud Costs by 62%
A Series A SaaS company was burning $48K/month on AWS. After a 6-week infrastructure audit and right-sizing project, we reduced their cloud bill to $18K/month — freeing capital for product development.
The Problem: Cloud Bill Growing Faster Than Revenue
Our client — a B2B SaaS company with $2.4M ARR — was spending $48,000/month on AWS, roughly 24% of revenue. As they scaled toward Series B, investors were concerned about unit economics. They engaged FBG for a cloud cost optimization engagement.
What We Found: The Usual Suspects
The audit revealed common patterns: EC2 instances sized for peak traffic running 24/7, RDS instances 4x overprovisioned, orphaned snapshots accumulating costs, NAT Gateway data transfer charges from suboptimal architecture, and no Reserved Instance coverage. All of this infrastructure had been provisioned manually — the first thing we fixed was adopting Infrastructure as Code so every future change would be reviewable and repeatable.
The Interventions
We implemented: EC2 right-sizing, RDS Aurora Serverless v2 for staging, S3 Intelligent Tiering for 2TB of historical data, consolidated NAT Gateways, and 1-year Reserved Instances for production databases. We also evaluated whether Kubernetes was necessary — it wasn't, and moving to managed services was one of the biggest savings drivers.
The Results
Month 1: $32K (from immediate right-sizing). Month 3: $21K (after RI purchases took effect). Month 6 steady state: $18K/month — a 62.5% reduction. Annual savings: $360K/year. The engagement paid for itself in 3 weeks.
The Lesson
Cloud cost optimization isn't about being cheap — it's about eliminating waste so you can invest in growth. The $360K in annual savings funded two additional engineers for this client. If your cloud bill is growing faster than your revenue, let's talk.
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