whitepaper

How a Real Estate SaaS Cut AWS Bill 38% in 12 Weeks.

An AWS cost optimization playbook for FinOps Leads who need durable savings, not one-time wins - rightsizing every fleet, sizing commitments to the steady-state workload, and the storage discipline that stops the bill from coming back.

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In depth

Your AWS Bill Is Climbing 30% A Year And Your Usage Is Climbing 8%.

AWS spend grows quietly.

Instances get oversized in incident response and never get resized. RDS classes step up at upgrade time and never step down. ElastiCache nodes get provisioned for a launch and outlive the workload they were sized for.

In shortElastiCache nodes get provisioned for a launch and o…

Most AWS optimization programs are too narrow.

Compute alone leaves the storage tail. Storage alone leaves the commitment gap. Commitments alone leave the rightsizing on the floor. The 38% savings landed because the program ran all three together.

In shortThe 38% savings landed because the program ran all t…

The detail

The Three Workstreams Every AWS Cost Optimization Program Needs.

Zone · 01

Rightsizing

Every EC2 instance, RDS instance, ElastiCache node, and OpenSearch domain gets a rightsizing recommendation. Most production fleets we audit have 20 to 35 percent of instances oversized, and the savings concentrate in the fleets nobody has looked at in two years.

Zone · 02

Commitments

Reserved instances and Savings Plans are leaving money on the table at most real estate SaaS companies. We size commitments to the steady-state workload, leave the variable portion on on-demand, and treat unused commitments as a metric the team is accountable for.

Zone · 03

Storage Optimization

S3 lifecycle policies. EBS volume right-typing. Snapshot retention rules. The storage tail is rarely the headline, but it compounds - and it is the part of the bill that grows even when usage does not.

By the numbers

The figures that make it a board-level conversation.

38%

Annual AWS spend reduction

$84K

EC2, RDS, ElastiCache rightsizing savings

$29K

Commitments savings

Inside the report

What you'll take away.

Weeks 1–3 - Rightsizing

Every EC2 instance, RDS instance, ElastiCache node, and OpenSearch domain gets a rightsizing recommendation. Most production fleets we audit have 20 to 35 percent of instances oversized.

Weeks 4–7 - Commitments

Weeks 8–10 - Storage optimization

S3 lifecycle policies. EBS volume right-typing.

Weeks 11–12 - Durable operating model

Tagging contract, monthly review cadence, owner-assigned for new spend over a threshold. The discipline that stops the bill from coming back.

Questions

Frequently asked.

Will rightsizing break things?

Not when shipped behind a feature flag with rollback. We have not had a customer-visible breach in our last 9 FinOps programs.

How do we handle the political dimension of dropping unused metrics?

We work jointly with the team that owns the metric. Anything actively used stays. Anything unused for 30 days gets archived rather than deleted, with a path to restore.

What about Reserved Instances we already have?

We use them. New commitments augment, not replace, existing commitments unless they are mis-sized.

Will the savings hold past the first year?

Yes, when the operating model lands with the program. Tagging contract, monthly review, ownership on new spend — without those, savings erode in two quarters.

Can we run this in parallel with normal product delivery?

Yes. Rightsizing rolls behind feature flags. Commitments are a finance operation. Storage policies are background changes. The team shipping product does not stop.

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