A guest post from Tibor Halasz, VP of Engineering at Simpro Group.

“Aimably’s insights gave us a strong starting point, and their recommendations fit naturally into our broader cloud strategy. Even though I wasn’t directly involved in the engagement, I was really pleased with the outcome, and my team found the experience incredibly valuable.”

The Challenge: Unifying Disconnected Cost Initiatives

When I joined Simpro Group as VP of Engineering, I inherited a cloud cost optimization effort that was already in progress. About four months before my time, the company had engaged Aimably to assess our cloud infrastructure and identify areas for efficiency. By the time I arrived, some of their recommendations were already being implemented, but the workstreams were operating independently.

I saw an opportunity—not just to continue the cost savings work but to structure it in a way that allowed us to:

• Align our efforts under a unified strategy
• Prioritize projects based on both technical feasibility and business impact
• Measure results effectively to ensure leadership and our private equity stakeholders had full visibility

At the same time, I wanted to set clear expectations with leadership. While Aimably’s recommendations provided a solid foundation, it was important that my team had the time and space to evaluate each change. I wanted to make sure we weren’t just implementing optimizations for the sake of it, but that each one was the right fit for our business and product architecture.

Our Approach: Prioritizing and Structuring the Work

Rather than treating Aimably’s report as a one-time audit, I approached it as a playbook for ongoing cost governance.

I divided the recommendations into two groups:

• Straightforward optimizations that we could implement immediately, such as EC2 rightsizing
• Items requiring deeper evaluation, where we either followed Aimably’s recommendation as written or used their findings as a starting point to explore alternative solutions better suited to our architecture

This ensured that every change we made was both deliberate and fully understood by the team responsible for its execution.

Case Study: Programmatic Scaling of RDS Databases with Confidence

One of the biggest wins came from Aimably’s recommendation to vertically scale our RDS databases, meaning to expand and contract the database’s actual size programmatically. Initially, my team was cautious about any kind of vertical scaling process. They worried that even a minor failover delay from one database size to another could impact the application experience. Rather than dismissing the recommendation outright, we ran extensive testing to determine the risk.

To our surprise, the impact was imperceptible. Confident in the results, we moved forward with constructing automated schedules based on historical load patterns, leading to a 7% monthly reduction in cloud costs.

The Results: A Sustainable Cost Efficiency Model

By the end of 2024, we had successfully reduced our cloud costs to just 1.57% of Annualized Recurring Revenue, far outperforming Aimably’s industry benchmark of 12% for a healthy technology company.

With a structured governance model in place, we were able to:

• Ensure cloud cost reductions aligned with our business strategy and product roadmap
• Provide leadership and investors with a clear, data-driven view of our cost optimization efforts
• Strengthen cost accountability within our engineering teams, making financial discipline a key principle of our decision-making

While Aimably worked hard to make recommendations that made sense for our environment, I believe strongly that my team are the experts in our own infrastructure. We treated every recommendation as a valuable insight but still conducted our own evaluation before implementing any change.

The challenge ahead isn’t just to keep costs flat—it’s to prove that we can continue scaling while making our cloud footprint even more efficient.

Lessons Learned: A Model for Scalable Cost Efficiency

For other technology leaders inheriting cloud cost optimization initiatives, I’d offer this advice:

• Cloud cost optimization is most effective when structured as a continuous process rather than a one-time effort
• A well-researched, outside perspective like Aimably’s provides a strong starting point, but internal teams should take ownership of implementation to ensure long-term success
• Testing assumptions—especially for changes with potential reliability risks—can help teams confidently move forward with optimizations

Aimably gave us a roadmap for sustainable cost management, but the real success came from embedding those principles into our day-to-day operations. By treating cost efficiency as an ongoing effort, we’re ensuring that as Simpro grows, our cloud costs don’t just remain stable—they continue to decline as a percentage of revenue.