SaaS Recovers $50K/Year in AWS Spend From a 30-Day Audit Sprint
The Challenge
A 60-person Series B SaaS company had grown its AWS footprint faster than its ability to manage it. The monthly bill was up more than 20% year over year, but with a single DevOps engineer carrying the entire environment, no one had the bandwidth to dig into where the money was going.
The trigger was a security questionnaire from a prospective enterprise customer. The team realized they couldn't confidently answer basic questions about IAM, logging, and public exposure — and that the same blind spots making security hard were also hiding cost waste. They didn't want an open-ended consulting engagement or a tool that would just hand them another dashboard to ignore. They wanted someone to look, fix the obvious problems, and leave them with guardrails.
Our Approach
Access + Baseline
Days 1-4Read-only access to the AWS account. Established a cost baseline and the top 10 spend drivers, and reviewed the security surface: public resources and IAM policies.
Audit + Quick-Win Prioritization
Days 5-14Full cost-waste scan (unattached resources, oversized instances, scheduling and commitment gaps) plus a security-posture assessment. Agreed the top three quick-wins with the client.
Implementation
Days 15-24Shipped the quick-wins: rightsizing, scheduling, cleanup, and IAM tightening — every change client-approved before execution, with a daily async update.
Guardrails + Handoff
Days 25-30Configured budgets and anomaly alerts, mapped cost ownership, documented runbook gaps, and delivered a 30/60/90-day roadmap.
Solution Overview
A fixed-scope 30-day Cloud & DevOps Audit Sprint: a full cost-waste scan, a security-posture snapshot, three agreed quick-wins shipped, and cost guardrails — all client-approved before any change.
The Results
Business Impact
"We expected a report. We got actual fixes shipped and a bill that's $4K/month lower — in a single sprint, for a fixed price."
HHead of Engineering, Series B SaaSSeries B B2B SaaS Company
"The guardrails matter as much as the savings — anomaly alerts mean the bill won't quietly creep back up."
HHead of Engineering, Series B SaaSSeries B B2B SaaS Company
Key Takeaways
- A fixed-scope sprint finds and ships fixes — not just a dashboard you have to act on later
- Cost waste and security gaps usually hide in the same neglected corners of an account
- Most first-pass AWS savings require no production changes
Key Outcome
Technologies Used
Compliance Frameworks
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