Summary
Toasty is a French e-commerce startup that had no dedicated FinOps resources and was hit by an unexpected $10,000+ Bedrock cost spike during a critical fundraising period. Automat-it recovered the full $10,000 in AWS credits, cut CloudFront costs by 36% through private pricing, and hardened the architecture to prevent future issues.
About Toasty
Toasty is a French e-commerce and AI startup founded in 2022. It operates as an eco-responsible shopping platform that promotes sustainable brands in lifestyle and wellness sectors.
The app curates products from over 1,500 brands for more than 550,000 members, including vegan sneakers, upcycled swimwear, and solid shampoos, while using gamification to engage users.
The Challenge: Scaling Cloud Costs Without Dedicated Oversight
Like many fast-growing startups, Toasty’s lean engineering team was fully focused on product development. This left critical AWS cost management gaps that threatened its financial position as its cloud footprint expanded.
Specific pain points included:
- No access to enterprise-grade pricing: As a scaling company, Toasty lacked the leverage or channel access to unlock private pricing programs and volume-based rate structures, leaving them paying standard on-demand rates across key services.
- No dedicated FinOps resources: With all internal bandwidth directed at product innovation, cost anomalies, billing surprises, and optimization opportunities went undetected — creating financial risk and missed savings.
- Reactive cost posture: Without proactive monitoring, unexpected spend events could materially impact runway with no early warning system in place.
- Uncontrolled Bedrock consumption: An inadvertent Amplify deployment re-enabled a Lambda trigger, causing a sudden $10,000+ cost spike that required immediate expert intervention.
The Solution: Managed FinOps and DevOps-Led Optimization
Toasty engaged Automat-it, as an AWS Premier Partner with dedicated FinOps expertise, to establish a fully managed, proactive FinOps practice led by an AWS Certified FinOps Analyst and Solutions Architect.
Working in close coordination with Automat-it’s DevOps team, the engagement delivered measurable impact across multiple areas:
- CloudFront Private Pricing Enrollment: Automat-it enrolled Toasty in the CloudFront Private Pricing Agreement (PPA), immediately reducing costs for GET requests and per-region charges by over 36%.
- DevOps-Led Log Investigation: The team conducted an in-depth investigation of CloudFront logs, uncovering persistent 403 errors caused by the application attempting to load non-existent image assets. These included deleted quiz images and stale user profile thumbnails.
- Aggressive Caching Strategy: Based on the investigation findings, Automat-it implemented an aggressive caching strategy and provided clear architectural recommendations to prevent future content gaps and deliver long-term cost stability.
- Bedrock Refund Coordination: Upon detecting the $10,000 cost spike, the FinOps team immediately took ownership. They gathered incident details, formatted the case, opened a support ticket through AWS via the Partner-Led Support (PLS) program, and managed the entire multi-month resolution process until AWS approved a full refund in credits.
- Proactive Daily Monitoring: Automat-it established continuous daily oversight with rapid anomaly detection, freeing Toasty’s team to focus entirely on product development and fundraising.
The Results: Over $10,000 Recovered and 36% CloudFront Savings
Through expert FinOps management and architectural improvements, Automat-it delivered immediate and sustained financial impact during a critical period in Toasty’s growth journey.
- Full Bedrock refund worth +$10,000: AWS approved a complete credit refund, fully mitigating the financial impact of the unintentional consumption incident.
- +36% instant CloudFront cost reduction: After PPA enrollment, monthly CloudFront costs dropped from an average of ~$1,431/month to ~$447/month (April–July 2026).
- Runway protection during fundraising: Rapid detection and containment of the Bedrock cost event prevented material impact on Toasty’s runway during a critical fundraising period.
- Long-term architectural resilience: DevOps-led investigation hardened CloudFront architecture against recurring errors, delivering operational stability beyond immediate savings.
- Zero internal resource burden: The entire refund coordination, pricing enrollment, and investigation process was handled end-to-end by Automat-it, allowing Toasty’s team to remain focused on product and fundraising.
Customer Testimonial
“Automat-it gave us exactly what we needed at a critical stage of our growth: clear visibility and confidence in our AWS spend without adding work for our team,” explained Renan Bronchart, CTO at Toasty.
“Their FinOps and DevOps experts reduced our CloudFront costs by more than 36% and took full ownership of the unexpected Bedrock charge, ultimately recovering five figures in AWS credits. That support protected our runway during fundraising and allowed us to stay focused on building the product.”
Start Your Journey with Automat-it
If you’re a fast-growing startup looking to protect runway and optimize performance at scale, Automat-it’s certified FinOps experts can help you unlock savings, recover unexpected costs, and build a proactive cloud cost management practice.
Get in touch to see how we can optimize your AWS environment.