Tool sprawl
Datadog, New Relic, and Sentry all billed monthly. Three CRMs. Two CDPs. Form builders, schedulers, billing tools — each renewed annually without a real owner.
A performance-based engineering practice
We cut your SaaS,
cloud, and infrastructure
spend.
Saascutters is an engineering practice that audits the software, cloud accounts, vendor contracts, hosting, and backend services quietly draining your operating budget. We then re-architect, renegotiate, or replace — and take thirty percent of verified first-year savings. No retainer.
25–40%
Typical recoverable spend
$0
Upfront retainer
30%
Of verified savings
12 mo.
Verification window
Engaged byCTOs·VPs of Engineering·FinOps leadership·Series B through enterprise
i.The problem
Most engineering budgets carry twenty-five to forty percent recoverable spend.
The patterns repeat across companies. The cost is real. The owner is missing.
Idle and over-provisioned cloud
Dev environments left on twenty-four hours a day. RDS at eight percent CPU. EC2 reservations expired three quarters ago. No one paged on it.
Hosting and egress leaks
Eighty thousand a year in inter-region transfer no one budgeted for. CloudFront, NAT gateways, log shipping — line items finance can no longer defend.
Auto-renewed enterprise contracts
Multi-year MSAs renewing at list price. Seat counts never reconciled. Discounts left on the table at every cycle.
ii.The approach
Five phases. Every phase ties to a dollar.
No ninety-day discovery deck. No frameworks. Each phase produces an artifact you can take to your CFO.
- 01
Discover
We map every SaaS subscription, vendor contract, cloud account, hosting line item, and internal service — alongside the engineering hours spent maintaining each.
- 02
Quantify
Every cost is tagged keep, renegotiate, replace, consolidate, or eliminate. Each tag carries a dollar value and a verification method agreed in writing.
- 03
Execute
We re-architect what should be re-architected, replace what should be replaced, and renegotiate the rest. Real engineering work, not strategy decks.
- 04
Verify
Each saving is documented against its prior cost line, signed off by your finance team, and tracked across the twelve-month measurement window.
- 05
Settle
Thirty percent of verified first-year savings, invoiced quarterly out of confirmed savings. No engagement runs in negative cashflow for you.
iii.Estimate
An order-of-magnitude estimate in thirty seconds.
Plug in approximate monthly SaaS and cloud spend. Real numbers are confirmed during the audit.
$35,000
$1k$200k+
$45,000
$1k$500k+
28%
10%50%
- Annualized spend
- $960,000
- Estimated savings
- $268,800
- Our 30% fee
- $80,640
- You retain
- $188,160
Estimate only. Actual savings depend on your stack, contracts, usage, architecture, and migration scope. Verified at audit.
iv.Services
Eight focused engagements, all measurable.
We choose the smallest set of moves that produces the largest verified saving. Nothing performative.
01
SaaS stack audit
Every subscription, seat, contract, integration. Overlap and waste surfaced and quantified.
02
Cloud cost optimization
AWS, GCP, Azure, Vercel, Fly, Render — right-size compute, kill idle, fix egress, restructure reservations.
03
Database and data-platform tuning
RDS, Aurora, Postgres, Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift. Right-size instances, fix runaway queries, prune storage.
04
Observability consolidation
One spend on logs, metrics, and traces — not three. Datadog, New Relic, Sentry, Honeycomb, Grafana reviewed end-to-end.
05
Vendor negotiation
We negotiate against your incumbent vendors at renewal. Discounts, downgrades, term restructuring.
06
Backend and service rewrites
When the math favors it, we replace expensive managed services with focused, owned implementations.
07
Hosting and CDN restructuring
Move workloads to the right runtime. Eliminate inter-region traffic. Restructure CDN tiers and cache rules.
08
FinOps tooling and dashboards
Ship lightweight cost dashboards your team will actually use. Tagging, alerts, monthly variance reports.
v.Stack coverage
Across your entire engineering surface.
From core cloud spend down to the marketing-ops SaaS line items finance cannot trace. Representative, not exhaustive.
Application & runtime
10 of manyDatadog·New Relic·Sentry·Honeycomb·LaunchDarkly·Algolia·Auth0·Stripe·Twilio·SendGrid
Data & analytics
09 of manySnowflake·BigQuery·Redshift·Databricks·Fivetran·dbt Cloud·Hightouch·Segment·Amplitude
Cloud & infrastructure
10 of manyAWS·GCP·Azure·Vercel·Netlify·Cloudflare·Fly.io·Render·Railway·DigitalOcean
Internal & operations
10 of manySalesforce·HubSpot·Zendesk·Intercom·Linear·Notion·Slack·GitHub·Atlassian·Asana
vi.Versus consulting firms
Big-4 consulting bills time. We bill outcomes.
A retainer rewards process. Our model rewards results. The behavioral difference shows up in week three.
Big-4 / consulting firm
Saascutters
Pricing
$200k+ annual retainer or $400/hour
$0 retainer · 30% of verified savings
Risk
Borne entirely by the client
Borne by us — no savings, no fee
Time to first saving
Quarters
Weeks
Deliverable
PowerPoint deck, framework
Cancelled contracts, working code, lower invoices
Incentive
Maximize billable hours
Maximize verified savings
Hands on infrastructure
Rarely — handed back to your team
Yes — we ship the change
Lock-in
12 to 24 month MSA
Single engagement, twelve-month verification window
vii.Engagements
From Series B to enterprise.
Sectors where the engineering bill is large enough that twenty-five to forty percent recoverable matters to the P&L.
- SaaS and B2B platformsSeries B through public — cloud, observability, vendor stack
- Healthcare technologyHIPAA-covered entities and BAs — clinical, payor, RCM
- Fintech and paymentsLatency-sensitive infrastructure, compliance overhead, ledger systems
- E-commerce and retailStorefront stack, fulfillment, BI, marketing-ops SaaS
- Media and adtechHigh-throughput data pipelines, CDN, log volume
- Enterprise ITSprawling vendor portfolios, post-merger consolidation
viii.Example engagements
What outcomes look like in production.
Representative patterns. Each row below is an example, not a guarantee.
Cloudexample
AWS rightsizing and reserved-instance restructuring
- Before
- $48k / mo across overprovisioned RDS and on-demand EC2
- After
- $28k / mo after rightsizing and 3-yr RIs
Annualized saving
$240,000 / yr
SaaSexample
Observability stack consolidated
- Before
- Datadog plus New Relic plus Sentry plus two log shipping vendors
- After
- One observability vendor, ingest tuned
Annualized saving
$182,000 / yr
Hostingexample
Inter-region egress eliminated
- Before
- Cross-region traffic, NAT gateway charges, log shipping cost
- After
- Architecture restructured to single-region hot path
Annualized saving
$94,000 / yr
SaaSexample
Salesforce seat audit and renegotiation
- Before
- Salesforce Enterprise, 380 seats, 40% inactive
- After
- Right-sized seats, multi-year discount
Annualized saving
$310,000 / yr
Dataexample
ETL platform replaced
- Before
- Fivetran usage-based, Snowflake spikes
- After
- Self-hosted ingest with materialized views
Annualized saving
$156,000 / yr
Backendexample
Auth provider migration
- Before
- Auth0 enterprise tier at MAU pricing
- After
- Migrated to a fixed-cost alternative
Annualized saving
$84,000 / yr
Example scenarios are illustrative. Actual savings depend on architecture, contracts, usage, and migration scope.
ix.Compliance and access
Built to work inside regulated environments.
We routinely engage with healthcare, fintech, and enterprise teams. Compliance is a precondition, not a feature.
HIPAA-compliant engagements
BAAs signed with covered entities and business associates. Scope confirmed in writing before any PHI is touched.
SOC 2-ready process
Engagement workflow aligns with SOC 2 controls. Access scoped, logged, and revoked at engagement close.
Least-privilege access
Read-only access by default to billing, cloud accounts, and SaaS admin panels. Write access negotiated per task.
NDAs and engagement letters
Mutual NDAs available. The engagement letter fixes scope, the definition of savings, the fee structure, and the verification window.
Specific compliance posture is scoped per engagement and confirmed in the engagement letter.
x.Frequently asked
The questions buyers actually ask.
If a question here isn't fully answered, raise it on the intro call. Nothing is off-limits.
- Every saving is line-itemed against its prior cost — software subscription, cloud line item, vendor contract, or labor hour at an agreed rate — and signed off by your finance team. We track each line over a twelve-month measurement window. No vague claims, no aggregate hand-waving.
xi.Request an audit
Six fields. One business day to respond.
Mutual NDA available. BAA available for HIPAA-covered engagements.