We saw a significantly different perspective than other providers when engaging with The Duckbill Group.

When Duckbill Group’s report said we’d save millions of dollars annually everyone could see this would be a big win.

Duckbill saved us all the money they promised and more. In just a few weeks they helped us reclaim 10% of our entire operating budget. Best contracting money I have ever spent. Not only did they give us advice throughout the engagement, but they kept dropping us tidbits of useful information even after our contract was up. They were super responsive, super fun, and it was just a joy to work with them.

Right out of the gate as a result of Corey’s work we could see one particular business unit was responsible for 60% of the charges. So instead of splitting the bill evenly between units, we can more accurately allocate those charges and bill each unit for exactly what they use with documentation to back it up – allowing them to budget, forecast and plan better. Now that we know exactly what each business unit spends in AWS, we can plan with far greater accuracy and pre-purchase resources at a reduced price. That allows us to trim the bill by 20-30%.

As a result of the cost-optimization work we did with Duckbill, we reduced our AWS bill by 25%—immediately,” Lange said. “While we could have done this on our own, it would have taken much longer and we would have wasted a lot of cash along the way.

The most helpful part was having access to Duckbill Group as experts to answer questions about AWS infrastructure (such as Cloudwatch and Redshift). Things that may or may not help with saving money exactly, but will set us up to build infrastructure that will scale better with respect to cost over time.

One of the main benefits we’re going to see from our continued work with Duckbill is the savings on our labor expenses. Like most companies, we have multi-million dollar infrastructure expenditures, but our labor expenditures are at least five times as expensive. The time savings is the big number we’re optimizing for and having access to experts with a deep knowledge of the architecture to prevent us from doing something wrong helps us do that.