CASE 15 · VANTAGE · 2026
A $400k monthly bill, with the right commitments for once.
A consumer SaaS company had a $400k/month AWS bill and a Savings Plans portfolio that someone had purchased in 2022 and never revisited. Coverage was 41%; effective rate was around 18%. We rebalanced the portfolio, paid down a chunk to Compute Savings Plans, and moved 35% of compute to Graviton.
Consumer SaaS
COST
2026
RESULTS
What changed, by the numbers.
EFFECTIVE SAVINGS
37%
COVERAGE
94%
GRAVITON MIGRATION
35%
PAYBACK PERIOD
11w
HOW IT WENT
The Cost Explorer view was misleading: it showed "$50k in savings" but a model against actual usage revealed massive over-commitment in one Convertible RI bucket and under-commitment everywhere else. The 2022 purchaser had bought one big number and walked away.
We modelled three years of usage including the seasonal floor, ran a Monte Carlo against expected growth, and recommended a tiered purchase: 1-year Compute Savings Plans for 70% of the floor, 3-year for 50% of that subset (the unambiguously durable usage), nothing for the spiky top decile.
Then we ran a Graviton migration pilot: the Fargate-based services where the team had no ARM-vs-x86 opinion got switched first. Performance was within noise; cost dropped 22% on the migrated services alone. By month three, the effective savings rate had more than doubled.
RELATED · SAME DOMAIN
Other engagements in this space.
READY WHEN YOU ARE
Let's get your AWS bill (and architecture) in order.
The discovery call is free. You walk away with at least one concrete idea — even if we never work together.