Case Study
A SaaS Automotive platform saves $590K per year — 12 points more performant than Savings Plans
How an automotive SaaS platform saves $590K per year with Autopilot rate optimization — outperforming Savings Plans by 12 percentage points.
The Challenge
A leading SaaS platform serving the automotive industry was managing AWS rate optimization manually — purchasing Savings Plans and Reserved Instances based on internal analysis. While this approach delivered some savings, the team knew they were leaving money on the table. The complexity of commitment management across a large fleet of EC2 and RDS instances made it difficult to achieve optimal coverage without either over-committing (waste) or under-committing (missed savings).
They needed an automated solution that could continuously optimize rates without the risk of long-term lock-in and without requiring dedicated engineering time to manage commitments.
The Approach
The company deployed Glassity's Autopilot — an automated rate optimization engine that procures discounted capacity on behalf of the customer. Autopilot analyzes workload patterns in real-time and makes commitment decisions that maximize savings while maintaining on-demand flexibility.
The key differentiator: the customer receives reserved instance pricing with on-demand flexibility. Glassity handles the multi-year commitments internally, so there's no lock-in to long-term contracts. Cancel anytime with 30-day notice.
The Results
$590K/yr
annual savings with Autopilot
+12pp
more performant than Savings Plans alone
Glassity's Autopilot delivered $590K in annual savings — and critically, outperformed the company's previous Savings Plans strategy by 12 percentage points. This means Autopilot captured significantly more discount coverage across the same fleet, without requiring any manual analysis or commitment decisions from their team.
The improvement came from Autopilot's ability to dynamically adjust commitment purchases based on real-time workload patterns — something that's practically impossible to achieve with manual Savings Plan purchases that rely on historical forecasts.
Why It Worked
- ✓ Fully automated — No engineering time spent on commitment management
- ✓ No lock-in — Reserved instance pricing with on-demand flexibility, cancel anytime
- ✓ Real-time optimization — Dynamic adjustments vs static Savings Plan forecasts
- ✓ Success-fee model — Only pays 10% of the savings Autopilot actually delivers
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