Logiciel Solutions built a self-managed SFTP ingestion pipeline on Amazon EC2 that delivers partner files into Amazon S3 at a fraction of the cost of a managed SFTP endpoint. Each file is received over SFTP, moved to its target S3 bucket, and deleted locally, cutting monthly SFTP costs by roughly 90% while keeping S3 as the single source of truth.
Splink needed a secure SFTP drop point for partners, but the always-on pricing of AWS Transfer Family exceeded its budget.
Splink needed partners to upload files over SFTP and have them land reliably in Amazon S3. AWS Transfer Family was the obvious fit, but it bills per endpoint for every hour it is enabled, plus a per-GB data charge, whether or not files arrive.
For this workload, that fixed baseline was out of proportion to its value and outside the budget.
Partners had to keep using standard SFTP tooling, with no changes on their side.
Each upload had to be delivered to the correct S3 location, with no long-term storage outside S3.
Per-hour endpoint billing plus per-GB fees made a weekly file drop expensive to run.
Monthly SFTP cost dropped from USD 219 to about USD 23, a saving of roughly USD 2,350 a year.
Partners kept their standard SFTP clients and credentials.
Files are removed from the server after upload, so nothing accumulates on EC2 and no long-lived copies of partner data exist outside S3.
Logiciel can tune users, folders and routing rules without managed-service limits.
The architecture was matched to the actual volume and access pattern, not to a default.
Logiciel runs and tunes the pipeline, so the client keeps the savings without the overhead.
A managed endpoint is the better choice for high file volumes, many endpoints, HIPAA or PCI DSS requirements, or teams without operations capacity. For weekly file drops, self-managed won.
If a managed service is costing more than the work it does, let’s look at the architecture together.
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