Case Study
Singular's cloud environment
AWS-logo
Kubernetes-logo
Datadog-Jun-26-2023-08-24-48-3221-AM
Company Size

250-500 employees

Industry

Advertising and Marketing

HQ

San Francisco, US

About Singular

Discover how, using Finout, Singular stopped paying savings fees for commitment management and reduced their COGS by over 30%.

Singular is a marketing intelligence tool that consolidates analytics, offering insights from isolated data. It links early-stage marketing with attribution data, enabling ROI measurement across channels and fine-tuning of expenses. Singular centralizes marketing data, connects crucial datasets for growth, and streamlines data into your preferred warehouse. Clients include Lyft, Rovio, Airbnb, Zynga, and more Fortune 500 companies.

 

Singular’s FinOps Challenge

In the past few years, Singular has experienced tremendous growth. As it scaled up, so did the number of AWS services and the complexity of their usage in their infrastructure. This resulted in many workloads with thousands of tenants to monitor –and a hefty AWS bill to accompany it.

The challenging setup process of creating the tools and then monitoring the cloud process added a layer of complexity to Singular’s work that took a lot of time and effort from the dev team. A better solution was needed.

Singular needed a platform that could both assist them in evaluating their AWS strategy to pinpoint areas of resource waste and accommodate the increasing utilization of various technologies, ensuring costs could be monitored and analyzed in one centralized location.

“Singular consistently utilizes Finout's CostGuard at the team level to curb cloud waste, saving a significant amount of money and giving insights our teams can actually use".

Ofir Nir | VP R&D

In addition, they required the platform to be able to supply the company’s leadership (product, CS, and executive level) with the level of visibility needed for them to make business decisions based on their infrastructure costs.

Singular's' need for a cost optimization solution

To address rising costs, Singular initially employed a cloud cost optimization solution that charged a significant amount of the savings. However, in their search for a tool that could pinpoint team-specific wastage, deliver in-depth analysis, and manage automatic commitments without eating into the savings, they realized the value of a modern FinOps tool. This realization came especially after considering the option of hiring several developers solely to avoid hefty savings fees

“Transitioning to Finout's CostOptimizer from a rival solution was seamless, resulting in substantial immediate savings on fees. Additionally, our daily savings have significantly increased, and we now save more while spending much less"

Ofir Nir | VP R&D

Why Finout?

Using Finout, Singular gains continuous insight into all their cloud services, eliminating the need for supplementary tools and connecting the dots between key cost centers like AWS, Kubernetes, and Snowflake. Additionally, by utilizing Finout's Cost Optimization Suite, Singular saves hundreds of thousands of dollars without any savings fees, making the switch to Finout an obvious choice.

Moreover, Finout empowered Singular with the ability to determine their desired cost per tenant, cost per data workload, and cost per unit of economics, providing a comprehensive solution they were seeking.

“Finout finally allows the team to look at their cost bills from a business perspective while also supporting their FinOps needs to constantly improve with their cost optimization solutions with no extra engineering hours required"

Ofir Nir | VP R&D

Additional benefits:

Accuracy

The platform needed to produce accurate results across all of Singular’s cost centers and adapt to the growing requests from the company as they grow.

Low touch approach

The implementation needs to be easy with no dev work needed. Finout’s platform does not need engineering hours or additional tagging.

Framework agnostic

The platform needed the ability to calculate the cost per tenant for all of Singular’s cost centers, meaning to support multiple different technologies (AWS, Kubernetes, Snowflake).

Help R&D decision-making

By proving full cost observability the teams wanted to get the information they needed to better strategies their cloud cost planning.

Replace internal solutions

The implementation needs to be easy with no dev work needed. Finout’s platform does not need engineering hours or additional tagging.

“In an ever-growing company, the infrastructure tends to grow with it. Using Finout we were able to distinguish the organic growth from the anomalies and catch issues before it was too expensive”

Ofir Nir  | VP R&D

The Results of Onboarding Finout’s Cloud Observability Platform

Singular was onboarded to Finout in just a couple of hours with no code changes or additional tagging needed. The very next day Singular stakeholders could slice/dice their AWS cost by customers, features, and create a unit of economic cost.

 

Cost Optimization

Onboarding to Finout's CostOptimizer was quick and seamless, with the immediate benefits outweighing the transition costs. Singular saw a notable drop in cloud expenses just by cutting savings fees on commitment management. When combined with regular savings from CostOptimizer and CostGuard, the savings effortlessly exceeded $100K.

It’s important to note that for Singular, whether savings arise from optimization or reduced fees, it all impacts Singular's COGS (Cost of Goods Sold). By integrating an effective optimization tool like CostOptimizer without any saving fees, you achieve a cost reduction of over 30% in your COGS.

This experience solidified Finout's FinOps solution as a pivotal component in Singular's Financial & DevOps operations.

 

Advanced FinOps features

Today the Singular team can review cost metrics by customer, feature, and unit of economics for AWS, saving dozens of hours a week. At the end of the day, Singular can monitor its cloud costs on a single platform.

The ability to understand how a single tenant use case can influence their margin has already generated several R&D roadmap changes; those decisions could have only been made quickly and effortlessly by monitoring their cost using Finout.

“Finout provides Singular with everything we need for cost observability, management and optimization, with more features added regularly to provide a wider rage of savings opportunities”

Ofir Nir  | VP R&D

singular-logo

Key Results for Singular
  • Hundreds of thousands of dollars in  annual savings.
  • 50% off engineering hours saved every month.
  • Saving costs per team using Finout's CostGuard on a regular bases.
  • 100% of Singular's cloud spend is managed in Finout's MegaBill (including AWS, EKS & Snowflake)
  • A detailed, granular view into any cost question in custom dashboards.

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