How Printify achieved 40% EC2 savings and flexibility at scale
“Return on investment is very clear. We have saved 40% on EC2 costs.”
Milan Dasek
Program Operations Manager at Printify
“For us, flexibility is crucial. We want to stay ready to switch to faster, cheaper instances, and Zesty allows that.”
Milan Dasek
Program Operations Manager at Printify
“It’s a hassle-free solution I can trust and rely on.”
Milan Dasek
Program Operations Manager at Printify
“Zesty is a real partner that helps us go through changes, investigate for us, and guide what to do next.”
Milan Dasek
Program Operations Manager at Printify
Customer
Brief
Printify is a global print-on-demand platform that connects creators and brands with print providers worldwide to design, sell, and ship custom products without having to worry about holding inventory or how to ship and deliver packages around the world. Printify is fully cloud-based. The company’s engineering operations run primarily on AWS, powering eight Kubernetes clusters and hundreds of nodes. Workloads are highly dynamic, with seasonal and event-driven spikes, and increasing use of GPU instances for image generation.
Key
Challenges
Printify’s cloud costs surged as rapid scale, unpredictable traffic spikes, and decentralized teams led to heavy and constant overprovisioning across their Kubernetes environment. At the same time, manual commitment management couldn’t keep up with daily workload shifts.
Key
Results
Zesty’s Commitment Manager enabled Printify to achieve 40% EC2 savings, reach 90% coverage, and cut commitment operations to less than one hour per week. The platform can now maintain maximum flexibility with micro Savings Plans.
The Challenge:
For a platform as dynamic as Printify, manual commitment management couldn’t keep up. The organization operated hundreds of Kubernetes nodes scaling up and down throughout the day across regions and workloads, driven by unpredictable bursts of user activity. A viral creator campaign or the holiday season could trigger massive traffic spikes in minutes, then drop just as quickly.
As the platform continued to grow year over year, cloud costs rose rapidly, making inefficiencies inevitable. With each team managing its own workloads, Reserved Instances and Savings Plans were often over-provisioned to avoid outages, resulting in unnecessary spend.
When the team built new Kubernetes clusters on AWS Spot Instances to maximize savings, they found that many regions frequently and unpredictably ran out of Spot capacity, forcing sudden fallbacks to on-demand. This volatility made costs harder to control and underscored the need for flexibility, crucial to keeping workloads stable and efficient.
Printify wanted to push further into Spot, but it was challenging and risky. Their platform is extremely image-intensive: every design requires generating and manipulating large visuals, producing multiple mockups in different sizes, colors, angles, and models. Scheduling new nodes and loading the large Docker images powering these workloads often took longer than AWS’s two-minute Spot interruption window, making Spot extension difficult.
At the same time, the company prioritized a no-upfront, high-flexibility approach to avoid long-term commitment lock-in, stay aligned with AWS’s rapid instance family updates, and support GPU-heavy, bursty workloads.
Zesty’s Solution:
When Printify first met Zesty four years ago, they quickly realized it could be a game-changer. Zesty’s automation could instantly simplify their commitment management, optimize instance types, sizes, and timing without requiring any manual effort from the team.
Commitment Manager soon became a cornerstone of their cloud cost strategy, ensuring continuous optimization while adapting to Printify’s highly dynamic workloads. It stepped in to tune Savings Plans and CRIs to keep high coverage, without the need for daily oversight.
When AWS began phasing out Reserved Instances in favor of Savings Plans, Zesty guided Printify through the transition. Commitment Manager built a dynamic portfolio of micro Savings Plans that grows or contracts with demand. This micro-commitment approach introduced finer-grained control: as clusters scaled up or down, Commitment Manager automatically purchases, renews, or lets micro Savings Plans expire naturally, maximizing coverage while eliminating lock-in.
These daily adjustments keep Printify fully covered without paying for unused capacity, even as workloads shift across families, sizes, or regions.
Commitment Manager’s flexibility also complements the spot-first approach. When workloads fall back from Spots to on-demand, Zesty covers these instances with micro savings plans so coverage remains efficient.
The Printify team relies on Zesty not only for savings and agility, but also for proactive guidance on AWS changes and best practices. “Zesty is not just a tool,” shared Milan Dasek, Program Operations Manager at Printify. “It’s a partner that helps us navigate AWS evolutions.”
The Result:
With Zesty’s Commitment Manager in place, Printify’s platform team moved from cost management to continuous optimization.
What once required daily attention and manual adjustments now runs automatically in the background, constantly adapting to dynamic workloads, hassle-free and with no manual intervention. Commitment operations, which once required daily checks and took several hours each week, are now reduced to roughly one hour.
Printify now enjoys over 90% coverage across its compute footprint, with Commitments gradually moving from a blend of classical CRIs and SPs to micro Savings Plans. As clusters scale or workloads move families, sizes, or fall back from Spot to on-demand, Commitment Manager keeps utilization high and waste low.
The result is a highly cost-efficient infrastructure that matches Printify’s business rhythm. Spikes from viral campaigns, seasonal surges, or influencer launches no longer threaten cost predictability. With commitments tightly aligned to usage and business growth, Commitment Manager enabled a 40% reduction in EC2 costs.
Zesty ensures Printify can maintain a flexibility-first strategy, minimizing lock-in and remaining free to migrate to newer, faster, cheaper generations like Graviton or GPU-based instances as they’re released.
What’s more, the transition away from Reserved Instances to Savings Plans was handled proactively. Guided by Zesty’s early insights, Printify started the move well ahead of deadlines, enabling a smooth transition.
Highly satisfied with Zesty, Printify has started extending into Zesty’s Kubernetes optimization tools. Zesty FastScaler, which drastically reduces application boot time by hibernating nodes with pre-cached container images, showed strong potential for its image-intensive workloads. Early tests showed Zesty could bring nodes online well under the two-minute threshold, making Spot viable even for their heaviest workloads.
Looking ahead, Printify sees the integration of Commitment Manager with Zesty’s Kubernetes tools making Printify’s infrastructure even more efficient. With both systems working together, real-time cluster decisions and dynamic commitments would create true “set it and forget it” operations, automatically managing commitments, Spot capacity, pod replicas, and right-sizing without daily oversight, perfectly suited to Printify’s fast-moving, global business model.
Customer
Brief
Printify is a global print-on-demand platform that connects creators and brands with print providers worldwide to design, sell, and ship custom products without having to worry about holding inventory or how to ship and deliver packages around the world. Printify is fully cloud-based. The company’s engineering operations run primarily on AWS, powering eight Kubernetes clusters and hundreds of nodes. Workloads are highly dynamic, with seasonal and event-driven spikes, and increasing use of GPU instances for image generation.
Key
Challenges
Printify’s cloud costs surged as rapid scale, unpredictable traffic spikes, and decentralized teams led to heavy and constant overprovisioning across their Kubernetes environment. At the same time, manual commitment management couldn’t keep up with daily workload shifts.
Key
Results
Zesty’s Commitment Manager enabled Printify to achieve 40% EC2 savings, reach 90% coverage, and cut commitment operations to less than one hour per week. The platform can now maintain maximum flexibility with micro Savings Plans.
“Return on investment is very clear. We have saved 40% on EC2 costs.”
Milan Dasek
Program Operations Manager at Printify
For a platform as dynamic as Printify, manual commitment management couldn’t keep up. The organization operated hundreds of Kubernetes nodes scaling up and down throughout the day across regions and workloads, driven by unpredictable bursts of user activity. A viral creator campaign or the holiday season could trigger massive traffic spikes in minutes, then drop just as quickly.
As the platform continued to grow year over year, cloud costs rose rapidly, making inefficiencies inevitable. With each team managing its own workloads, Reserved Instances and Savings Plans were often over-provisioned to avoid outages, resulting in unnecessary spend.
When the team built new Kubernetes clusters on AWS Spot Instances to maximize savings, they found that many regions frequently and unpredictably ran out of Spot capacity, forcing sudden fallbacks to on-demand. This volatility made costs harder to control and underscored the need for flexibility, crucial to keeping workloads stable and efficient.
Printify wanted to push further into Spot, but it was challenging and risky. Their platform is extremely image-intensive: every design requires generating and manipulating large visuals, producing multiple mockups in different sizes, colors, angles, and models. Scheduling new nodes and loading the large Docker images powering these workloads often took longer than AWS’s two-minute Spot interruption window, making Spot extension difficult.
At the same time, the company prioritized a no-upfront, high-flexibility approach to avoid long-term commitment lock-in, stay aligned with AWS’s rapid instance family updates, and support GPU-heavy, bursty workloads.
“For us, flexibility is crucial. We want to stay ready to switch to faster, cheaper instances, and Zesty allows that.”
Milan Dasek
Program Operations Manager at Printify
When Printify first met Zesty four years ago, they quickly realized it could be a game-changer. Zesty’s automation could instantly simplify their commitment management, optimize instance types, sizes, and timing without requiring any manual effort from the team.
Commitment Manager soon became a cornerstone of their cloud cost strategy, ensuring continuous optimization while adapting to Printify’s highly dynamic workloads. It stepped in to tune Savings Plans and CRIs to keep high coverage, without the need for daily oversight.
When AWS began phasing out Reserved Instances in favor of Savings Plans, Zesty guided Printify through the transition. Commitment Manager built a dynamic portfolio of micro Savings Plans that grows or contracts with demand. This micro-commitment approach introduced finer-grained control: as clusters scaled up or down, Commitment Manager automatically purchases, renews, or lets micro Savings Plans expire naturally, maximizing coverage while eliminating lock-in.
These daily adjustments keep Printify fully covered without paying for unused capacity, even as workloads shift across families, sizes, or regions.
Commitment Manager’s flexibility also complements the spot-first approach. When workloads fall back from Spots to on-demand, Zesty covers these instances with micro savings plans so coverage remains efficient.
The Printify team relies on Zesty not only for savings and agility, but also for proactive guidance on AWS changes and best practices. “Zesty is not just a tool,” shared Milan Dasek, Program Operations Manager at Printify. “It’s a partner that helps us navigate AWS evolutions.”
With Zesty’s Commitment Manager in place, Printify’s platform team moved from cost management to continuous optimization.
What once required daily attention and manual adjustments now runs automatically in the background, constantly adapting to dynamic workloads, hassle-free and with no manual intervention. Commitment operations, which once required daily checks and took several hours each week, are now reduced to roughly one hour.
Printify now enjoys over 90% coverage across its compute footprint, with Commitments gradually moving from a blend of classical CRIs and SPs to micro Savings Plans. As clusters scale or workloads move families, sizes, or fall back from Spot to on-demand, Commitment Manager keeps utilization high and waste low.
The result is a highly cost-efficient infrastructure that matches Printify’s business rhythm. Spikes from viral campaigns, seasonal surges, or influencer launches no longer threaten cost predictability. With commitments tightly aligned to usage and business growth, Commitment Manager enabled a 40% reduction in EC2 costs.
Zesty ensures Printify can maintain a flexibility-first strategy, minimizing lock-in and remaining free to migrate to newer, faster, cheaper generations like Graviton or GPU-based instances as they’re released.
What’s more, the transition away from Reserved Instances to Savings Plans was handled proactively. Guided by Zesty’s early insights, Printify started the move well ahead of deadlines, enabling a smooth transition.
Highly satisfied with Zesty, Printify has started extending into Zesty’s Kubernetes optimization tools. Zesty FastScaler, which drastically reduces application boot time by hibernating nodes with pre-cached container images, showed strong potential for its image-intensive workloads. Early tests showed Zesty could bring nodes online well under the two-minute threshold, making Spot viable even for their heaviest workloads.
Looking ahead, Printify sees the integration of Commitment Manager with Zesty’s Kubernetes tools making Printify’s infrastructure even more efficient. With both systems working together, real-time cluster decisions and dynamic commitments would create true “set it and forget it” operations, automatically managing commitments, Spot capacity, pod replicas, and right-sizing without daily oversight, perfectly suited to Printify’s fast-moving, global business model.
“It’s a hassle-free solution I can trust and rely on.”
Milan Dasek
Program Operations Manager at Printify
