From $65K to $25: How Innovative Engineering Cut Costs by 99.96%

On one engagement, we were brought in after a previous vendor had stopped responding, leaving them without a functioning solution. The original vendor had proposed a high-cost approach, estimating $65,000 per run to process the client’s data using AWS Textract to extract and format the information.

After carefully analyzing the requirements and taking a step back to rethink the approach, we identified a more efficient and scalable solution. By leveraging AWS Lambda or AWS ECS Fargate, we built a serverless, event-driven processing pipeline that optimized resource allocation, significantly reducing execution time. The new solution processed the same data in minutes, with a per-run cost of just $25—a 99.96% cost reduction compared to the original estimate.

This experience underscored the importance of choosing the right tools for the problem, rather than defaulting to expensive, off-the-shelf managed services. It reinforced that the quickest-looking solution isn’t always the best one—by evaluating alternative architectures, automation, and cloud-native efficiencies, we were able to deliver better results at a fraction of the cost.

From Firefighting to Future-Proofing: How We Stabilized & Containerized a Failing Platform

We were brought in to assess and stabilize a client’s AWS EC2-based platform, which was plagued by frequent deployment failures and server crashes. The instability was made worse by the fact that logs were lost when the servers crashed, making debugging nearly impossible. The client’s team was stuck in a cycle of reactive fixes, unable to pinpoint the root cause of failures.

To restore stability, we focused on fixing deployment scripts, improving error handling on startup, reducing dependencies on external services, and resolving service startup timing issues. These changes significantly reduced crashes and improved reliability, allowing the client’s team to regain control of their platform.

With stability restored, we moved forward with containerizing the solution to eliminate reliance on, in this case, a fragile server based solution. By leveraging AWS Elastic Container Service (ECS), we ensured workloads could restart instantly, centralized logging for full visibility, automated deployments with CI/CD pipelines, and improved resource efficiency.

With the new architecture in place, the client no longer had to fear deployments, lost logs, or unexpected crashes. Instead of constantly firefighting, their team could now focus on product development and growth. This engagement demonstrated how modernizing infrastructure with AWS ECS can turn an unreliable system into a scalable, resilient platform.