43% GCP Cost Reduction for UltraFlix - $84K Annual Savings in 2 Weeks
43% reduction in monthly GCP bill. $84K annual savings. Delivered in 2 weeks with zero service disruption.
The Challenge
A Series A FinTech startup in London had seen their GCP bill grow from $8K/month to $16K/month over 18 months without a corresponding growth in active users. Their engineering team was stretched across product delivery and had no capacity to investigate cloud spend. The CFO needed the bill reduced before the next board meeting without impacting platform reliability.
Our Approach
Spend Audit & Waste Identification
We connected to GCP billing export and ran a 30-day spend analysis. We identified $4.2K/month in idle Compute Engine instances from deprecated feature branches, $2.1K/month in unattached persistent disks, and $1.8K/month in Cloud SQL instances running at 12% average utilisation.
Rightsizing & Committed Use Discounts
We rightsized 14 compute instances based on 30-day CPU and memory utilisation data, and purchased 1-year Committed Use Discounts for the stable baseline workload - locking in a 37% discount on committed resources.
Storage & Database Optimisation
We migrated infrequently accessed Cloud Storage buckets to Nearline and Coldline tiers, implemented snapshot lifecycle policies, and consolidated three underutilised Cloud SQL instances into one appropriately-sized instance.
Tagging & Cost Allocation
We implemented a mandatory resource tagging policy with Terraform and configured a cost allocation dashboard in Looker Studio, giving the CFO and CTO real-time spend visibility by environment, feature, and team.
Results
43%
Reduction in monthly GCP bill
$84K
Annual savings
2 weeks
Implementation time
0
Service disruption incidents
Technology Stack
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