Summary
To meet critical year-end gross margin targets, German headless CMS provider Hygraph met year-end gross margins targets by working with Automat-it to implement a targeted FinOps strategy to tackle rising AWS infrastructure costs. A PPA for CloudFront and transitioning 75% of compute spend to a managed 3-year Savings Plan resulted in a 66% reduction in CloudFront expenses, allowing the startup to hit its financial objectives and simplify operations.
About Hygraph
Hygraph is a CMS platform based in Germany. As a leading provider in the space, Hygraph enables businesses to manage and distribute content efficiently across diverse digital channels.
Its headless CMS for teams scaling their content operations allows you to structure any content, so your entire team can launch faster with AI you can control and trust.
The Challenge – Rising Infrastructure Costs
Before engaging with Automat-it, Hygraph faced significant financial pressure due to rising infrastructure costs. Key challenges included:
- High CloudFront and overall cloud spend: Cloud expenditures, particularly for CloudFront, were becoming prohibitively expensive.
- Limited visibility into infrastructure waste: The internal team suspected there was waste within their environment, but lacked the granular details and insights needed to optimize spend effectively.
- Meeting financial target deadlines: Hygraph needed to significantly lower costs to meet critical gross margin targets by the end of the year, providing a tight seven-month window for optimization.
The Solution – Targeted Cost Optimization
Automat-it implemented a comprehensive Cost Optimization and FinOps strategy to maximize savings while maintaining the operational flexibility required by a scaling platform.
Key elements of the solution included:
- CloudFront PPA Implementation: Automat-it secured a Private Pricing Addendum (PPA) for CloudFront, immediately reducing one of Hygraph’s largest cost drivers.
- Strategic Commitment Management: Automat-it’s FinOps experts took over the management of Hygraph’s AWS Savings Plans (SPs). This included optimizing existing plans and transitioning from 1-year to 3-year commitments for approximately 75% of their compute spend to maximize long-term savings.
- Managed Flexibility: To ensure Hygraph could adapt to changing needs, Automat-it managed additional Savings Plans to provide flexibility for spend that the company was not yet ready to commit to long-term.
- Ongoing Lifecycle Management: Automat-it’s team provided continuous management, topping up and renewing Savings Plans as they expired to ensure uninterrupted cost-efficiency.
The Results
Working with Automat-it delivered immediate financial benefits, enabling Hygraph to meet its critical end-of-year business objectives. Specifically, the collaboration achieved:
- 66% Reduction in CloudFront Costs: The CloudFront PPA delivered massive savings on one of Hygraph’s primary infrastructure expenses.
- Yearly Gross Margin Targets Met: Hygraph successfully met its gross margin goals for the year – a top priority for company leadership.
- Over $8,000 in Monthly Savings: Through managed Savings Plans and strategic commitments, Hygraph realized approximately $1,250 in monthly SP savings managed by Automat-it, plus an additional $7,000 per month in savings from their own commitments.
- Simplified Financial Operations: By consolidating commitments to align on the same future end date, Automat-it reduced administrative overhead while maximizing overall financial returns.
- Costs kept down while transitioning to a new architecture: with the Automat-it managed saving plans, Hygraph was able to transition to a more cost-efficient architecture, and configure its own saving plans after a short analysis period.
Customer Testimonial
“As our cloud costs continued to grow, and with CloudFront spend expected to rise further over the course of the year, we needed both immediate relief and a sound longer-term approach,” explained Pablo Fernandez Busch, VP of Engineering at Hygraph.
“Automat-it helped us quickly reduce CloudFront cost pressure and supported us with additional compute Savings Plans while we worked through internal architectural changes aimed at lowering costs further. Their support was especially valuable during the transition, giving us the flexibility to operate efficiently in the short term while we validated the new setup and determined the Savings Plans structure best suited to our architecture.”
Start Your Cost Optimization Journey with Automat-it
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