Fast Growing SaaS Company Cuts Azure Waste by 47% in 90 Days
Industry: Technology
Company size: 3,200 employees
Location: North America and Europe
Service: FinOps 360 / Azure Cost Optimization
Result: 47% reduction (approx $2.6M annualised)
Executive Summary
A fast growing SaaS provider’s Azure bill had tripled in eighteen months as engineering teams scaled infrastructure ahead of governance. Livingstone’s FinOps 360 Managed Service identified and eliminated cloud waste, cutting monthly Azure spend by 47% within 90 days without impacting product performance.
The Challenge
A venture backed SaaS provider had scaled its Azure footprint rapidly to support customer growth, with engineering teams empowered to provision resources independently and minimal centralised cost governance.
Monthly Azure spend had tripled in eighteen months, materially ahead of revenue growth, and finance had no reliable way to attribute cost to product lines or engineering teams. With a Series C fundraise approaching, leadership needed to demonstrate disciplined unit economics without slowing product development.
The Solution
Livingstone’s FinOps 360 Managed Service ran a rapid Cloud Cost Control assessment, mapping spend against actual utilisation across compute, storage and managed services to identify idle and oversized resources.
An Azure Cost Optimization programme implemented rightsizing, reserved instance and savings plan coverage, and automated shutdown policies for non production environments, working directly with engineering leads to avoid disrupting active development. A lightweight cost allocation tagging structure was introduced so finance could attribute spend to product lines going forward, supported by a monthly FinOps reporting cadence.
The Outcome
Within 90 days, monthly Azure spend fell by 47%, equivalent to approximately $2.6M annualised, achieved primarily through eliminating idle non production resources and improving reserved capacity coverage. No production performance degradation was reported.
Key Success Factors
- A rapid, utilisation based assessment that avoided disrupting active engineering work
- Close collaboration with engineering leads rather than a top down cost cutting mandate
- A lasting tagging and reporting structure that gave finance ongoing visibility, not just a one off saving
The Conclusion
The engagement gave the client a defensible, governed cloud cost story ahead of its fundraise, and a FinOps operating rhythm that has kept spend growth aligned to revenue growth since.
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