Infrastructure cost control is one of the most pressing—and misunderstood—challenges for platform teams today. Between sprawling cloud bills, opaque usage patterns, and the pressure to scale fast, many engineering leaders find themselves stuck explaining burn without a clear narrative.
This case study walks through how a mid-stage SaaS startup used Revolte to reduce infrastructure costs by 30% in under four months—without pausing innovation or sacrificing performance. More importantly, it shows how cost transparency became a foundation for executive alignment, enabling faster decisions and smarter growth bets.
The Company: A Scaling SaaS Startup with Cloud Chaos
The subject of this study is ClearRate, a B2B SaaS company helping enterprise finance teams automate real-time pricing workflows. In early 2024, ClearRate had grown to 65 engineers across four product lines and was burning upwards of $600k per month on infrastructure.
Despite strong revenue growth, the executive team was uneasy. Margins were narrowing. Infra costs had ballooned 3x in 18 months. But no one could explain why or how to fix it without risking engineering velocity. The platform team was under pressure to “get costs under control” without clear benchmarks or tooling.
The Problem: Cost Visibility Was Fragmented and Post-Hoc
Like many cloud-native startups, ClearRate’s infra stack had evolved rapidly: multi-cloud deployments across AWS and GCP, half a dozen third-party CI/CD tools, homegrown scripts, and multiple staging environments per team.
Despite using cost dashboards from their cloud providers, the team couldn’t answer key questions:
- Which services or teams were driving cost spikes?
- How much of the infra bill was tied to dev/test vs production?
- What would different scaling scenarios cost over the next two quarters?
Reporting was reactive, buried in spreadsheets, and often outdated. This opacity made it nearly impossible to forecast costs, enforce accountability, or make tradeoffs at the exec level.
The Turning Point: A New Mandate from Leadership
In Q1 2024, ClearRate’s CFO joined the weekly engineering leadership meeting with a direct ask: “I need to show the board a path to cut 25% of infra spend in 90 days—without touching headcount or roadmap. Can we do it?”
It wasn’t a reprimand. It was a strategic moment. Engineering had a seat at the table. But they needed to answer in business terms, fast.
That’s when the Head of Platform, Lisa Nguyen, turned to Revolte.
The Implementation: Deploying Revolte for Visibility and Control
Revolte was rolled out in two weeks across ClearRate’s core environments. The platform’s AI-native observability layer connected directly to their CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure configurations, and cloud billing APIs. What followed was a three-phase playbook:
1. Cost Attribution by Team and Service
Within days, Revolte surfaced precise breakdowns of cost by team, environment, and individual service. This revealed:
- 47% of infra costs tied to staging environments, many of which hadn’t been used in weeks
- One ML model pipeline costing $38k/month due to inefficient autoscaling logic
- Four redundant third-party tools overlapping in CI/CD functions
Lisa used Revolte’s dashboard to create cost reports that aligned with how the exec team thought: business unit, feature line, and customer segment.
2. Automated Scaling Simulations
Using Revolte’s forecasting engine, the team simulated different scaling scenarios—what happens if we double traffic, consolidate environments, or shift workloads regionally? This allowed product and finance leaders to visualize trade-offs:
- Moving from four to two staging environments would save $84k annually with no material impact on developer velocity
- Switching off a third-party load balancer in favor of native cloud services would reclaim $11k/month
- Introducing sleep cycles for unused dev infra yielded another ~$9k/month
3. Real-Time Guardrails and Alerts
Revolte enabled threshold-based alerts when team or service costs deviated from forecasted norms. This wasn’t just monitoring—it was a communication layer between engineering and finance. When a spike occurred, it came with context: which change caused it, what team owned it, and how to remediate.
The Results: 30% Infra Cost Reduction in 4 Months
By Q2 2024, ClearRate had reduced monthly infrastructure spend from $612k to $427k—a 30.2% drop. But the bigger win was strategic clarity:
- Executive confidence: CFO and CTO jointly presented the cost reduction plan to the board with visuals powered by Revolte
- Team alignment: Engineering leads had dashboards showing cost per deploy, tied to their own usage
- Faster decision cycles: New product launches came with pre-modeled cost scenarios, enabling green lights in days, not weeks
Here’s a snapshot of the before/after impact:
| Metric | Before | After | Delta |
| Monthly Infra Spend | $612,000 | $427,000 | -30.2% |
| Environments in Use | 15 | 6 | -60% |
| Cost per Deploy (avg) | $1,430 | $895 | -37% |
| Time to Cost Report | 2 weeks | Real-time | -92% |
The Executive Enablement Angle
This transformation wasn’t just technical. It was cultural. The ability to tie infrastructure to business outcomes—through clear forecasts, real-time cost models, and understandable metrics—changed how platform engineering was perceived.
Before Revolte, Lisa’s team was seen as a cost center. After Revolte, they became strategic operators, informing roadmap pacing, pricing decisions, and even customer segmentation based on usage patterns.
This is executive enablement in action: empowering leadership with visibility and options, not just reports. It’s what made ClearRate’s board confident in reinvesting in platform initiatives rather than slashing them.
How Revolte Made It Possible
Revolte’s platform gave ClearRate the missing link: a system of record for infrastructure economics. Where traditional tools show costs after the fact, Revolte models cost as a function of change. That made all the difference.
Key capabilities that unlocked value:
- Team-based cost attribution: See who’s using what, and why
- Predictive modeling: Forecast spend by team, region, or traffic pattern
- AI-native observability: Correlate code changes with cost shifts instantly
- Smart alerts: Get notified when usage deviates from forecasted norms
This clarity turned every infra conversation from reactive to strategic. It made engineering a more credible partner to finance, product, and leadership.
The Takeaway: Cost Clarity Is Executive Enablement
ClearRate didn’t just cut costs—they built a culture of operational excellence. By pairing engineering visibility with financial forecasting, they earned trust at the executive level and changed how infra investments are evaluated.
Cost optimization is not about austerity. It’s about alignment. And when you have the right data, the right models, and the right narrative, you can turn even the messiest cloud bills into a strategic advantage.
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