It’s 2022 and the macroeconomic environment is severely correcting from the easy days of cheap capital.

In this environment it’s wise on a personal and business level to consider expenditures and ensure they’re providing value. I’ve been through this with personal subscriptions and with family financial planning.

Today I spent a day off work helping a friend and colleague from a former startup in optimizing his company’s tech infrastructure spend. His business is a web application with a valuable service but low traffic levels ( < 10 RPS ) and running on Heroku.

Within the first 30 minutes of him screensharing and describing the business behavior of the app, I was able to recommend $200/mo (25%) savings on his plan.

With another 2 hours, I had a recommendation for how to save another $450, which is a great savings for an indie lifestyle business. That will save him $7,800 per year and reduce his Heroku bill from ~$800 down to $150 per month.

In debugging that, I discovered how he can also trim 20 seconds (ie 75%) off of a critical feature which will translate to increased conversion.

It was a fun problem to solve and fits well into my interest in either increasing business through technology or increasing efficiency and profit through technology. I’ve done similar projects on database and server spend which yields amazing results at scale (7 figures per year), on backend and frontend performance in small and medium size companies, and take pleasure in using my expertise at the intersection of technology and business.

I’ll test the waters to see if there’s demand for consulting to help companies outsource these efforts and reduce their AWS / Heroku / NewRelic / Datadog / etc bills.

The timing is right for this adventure.