How Zesty helped Sastrify Become a Continuous Optimization Service, Powering Tremendous Ongoing Cloud Savings for Customers
“With Zesty, we can offer more to our customers. We’re not just saving our customers money and disappearing. We also continue to support our customers to keep their spend in-check and provide value over time.“
“Zesty has been instrumental towards helping Sastrify reposition ourselves as an ongoing service provider that helps our customers evolve their tech stack as they grow.”
“Even months after we’ve integrated Zesty into our customer’s environment, the experience still continues to be consistently positive.” Sergio Chavez – Head of Partnerships and Reselling
“For most of our customers Zesty is really a no-brainer. Whereas before maintaining EC2 involved a lengthy process of constant monitoring, now Zesty does all the work, our customers just need to check the numbers and that’s it.”
Customer
Brief
Founded in 2020 by Maximilian Messing and Sven Lackinger, Sastrify is a virtual SaaS procurement service, helping finance and tech teams to optimize the management and minimize the cost of SaaS tools. The Sastrify platform enables procurement, tech, and finance teams to work together, benefitting from streamlined buying processes, partnerships with leading SaaS vendors, and an ever-growing database of price benchmarks. Backed by FirstMark and HV Capital, Sastrify supports hundreds of clients globally, including Gorillas, Pleo, and Capchase.
Key
Challenges
Customers were over-spending on AWS, and EC2 in particular, because they were unable to accurately forecast usage 1-3 years in advance.
Key
Results
Zesty enables Sastrify to continue to help keep their customer’s EC2 spend in check and provide them with value over time as they grow.
The Challenge:
Sastrify’s mission is to help their customers get more control over software spend. In order to accomplish this, much of their strategy involves providing a single source of truth for all software vendors, finding out who is the owner, how much is spent, and if they are getting the best possible deal.
Around 80% of their customers use AWS, and the cost of their EC2 overshadowed all other expenses. To help them leverage more savings, Sastrify would identify what each customer is using from AWS, analyze whether their infrastructure is suitable for their needs, and determine whether their investment is yielding the best results for them.
Prior to Zesty, Sastrify helped their customers by getting a FinOps specialist to review their tech stack and identify cost savings starting with the biggest line items through to the smallest. From there, they would benchmark, offer alternative contracts for their customers and support them in purchase negotiations. To enable greater savings on AWS, Sastrify reduced their customer’s EC2 costs by supporting discount program adoption, improved utilization, and supporting negotiations with their Enterprise Discount Program (EDP) or cross pricing.
As time went on however, they noticed their customers were struggling to forecast their usage properly in order to leverage the best Reserved Instance (RI) discounts since it required them to commit to particular instance types 1-3 years in advance. Because they didn’t know what their growth will look like in the near future, let alone 1 or 3 years in the future, utilizing RIs was a tremendous challenge. As a result, they were not adequately taking advantage of available discounts for EC2.
Zesty’s Solution:
IaaS is a huge chunk of the costs Sastrify customers were incurring. To help them out, the Sastrify team scoured the market and evaluated many vendors that promised to help customers save on AWS. Eventually, they found Zesty and picked it for its multiple comparative strengths; the deep savings, the simple onboarding and ease of use, and versatility.
The partner process was seamless and transparent from day one. The process of integrating with their customers, onboarding them, and monitoring the integration required little work from their end. Aside from significantly reducing costs, working with Zesty was a great experience for the time savings that it provided.
The Result:
The feedback from Sastrify customers is that Zesty is truly a no-brainer. Instead of struggling to accurately forecast their needs well into the future, they’re able to take advantage of the discounts provided by RIs without any long-term commitment.
Now, maintaining EC2 costs is no longer a lengthy process of constant monitoring. Instead, it only takes a few minutes of reconciling costs against what they see in their Cost Explorer account.
Zesty makes it easier for Sastrify to fulfill their promise of saving customers more than the cost of their services. With this significant added value, customers are pursuing Sastrify to renew their contracts.
Best of all, Zesty’s addition to Sastrify’s value proposition and product portfolio has enabled Sastrify to transform from a one off consultation service to a “continuous optimization service” that is monetized through a subscription model. Their product offering accompanies the customer throughout their lifecycle, as their EC2 spend increases, and properly supports them as they grow and evolve their tech stack. This repositioning as an ongoing service provider that helps customers as they scale and evolve, significantly compounds their revenue generation and their predictable annual revenue.
Customer
Brief
Founded in 2020 by Maximilian Messing and Sven Lackinger, Sastrify is a virtual SaaS procurement service, helping finance and tech teams to optimize the management and minimize the cost of SaaS tools. The Sastrify platform enables procurement, tech, and finance teams to work together, benefitting from streamlined buying processes, partnerships with leading SaaS vendors, and an ever-growing database of price benchmarks. Backed by FirstMark and HV Capital, Sastrify supports hundreds of clients globally, including Gorillas, Pleo, and Capchase.
Key
Challenges
Customers were over-spending on AWS, and EC2 in particular, because they were unable to accurately forecast usage 1-3 years in advance.
Key
Results
Zesty enables Sastrify to continue to help keep their customer’s EC2 spend in check and provide them with value over time as they grow.
“With Zesty, we can offer more to our customers. We’re not just saving our customers money and disappearing. We also continue to support our customers to keep their spend in-check and provide value over time.“
Sastrify’s mission is to help their customers get more control over software spend. In order to accomplish this, much of their strategy involves providing a single source of truth for all software vendors, finding out who is the owner, how much is spent, and if they are getting the best possible deal.
Around 80% of their customers use AWS, and the cost of their EC2 overshadowed all other expenses. To help them leverage more savings, Sastrify would identify what each customer is using from AWS, analyze whether their infrastructure is suitable for their needs, and determine whether their investment is yielding the best results for them.
Prior to Zesty, Sastrify helped their customers by getting a FinOps specialist to review their tech stack and identify cost savings starting with the biggest line items through to the smallest. From there, they would benchmark, offer alternative contracts for their customers and support them in purchase negotiations. To enable greater savings on AWS, Sastrify reduced their customer’s EC2 costs by supporting discount program adoption, improved utilization, and supporting negotiations with their Enterprise Discount Program (EDP) or cross pricing.
As time went on however, they noticed their customers were struggling to forecast their usage properly in order to leverage the best Reserved Instance (RI) discounts since it required them to commit to particular instance types 1-3 years in advance. Because they didn’t know what their growth will look like in the near future, let alone 1 or 3 years in the future, utilizing RIs was a tremendous challenge. As a result, they were not adequately taking advantage of available discounts for EC2.
“Zesty has been instrumental towards helping Sastrify reposition ourselves as an ongoing service provider that helps our customers evolve their tech stack as they grow.”
IaaS is a huge chunk of the costs Sastrify customers were incurring. To help them out, the Sastrify team scoured the market and evaluated many vendors that promised to help customers save on AWS. Eventually, they found Zesty and picked it for its multiple comparative strengths; the deep savings, the simple onboarding and ease of use, and versatility.
The partner process was seamless and transparent from day one. The process of integrating with their customers, onboarding them, and monitoring the integration required little work from their end. Aside from significantly reducing costs, working with Zesty was a great experience for the time savings that it provided.
The feedback from Sastrify customers is that Zesty is truly a no-brainer. Instead of struggling to accurately forecast their needs well into the future, they’re able to take advantage of the discounts provided by RIs without any long-term commitment.
Now, maintaining EC2 costs is no longer a lengthy process of constant monitoring. Instead, it only takes a few minutes of reconciling costs against what they see in their Cost Explorer account.
Zesty makes it easier for Sastrify to fulfill their promise of saving customers more than the cost of their services. With this significant added value, customers are pursuing Sastrify to renew their contracts.
Best of all, Zesty’s addition to Sastrify’s value proposition and product portfolio has enabled Sastrify to transform from a one off consultation service to a “continuous optimization service” that is monetized through a subscription model. Their product offering accompanies the customer throughout their lifecycle, as their EC2 spend increases, and properly supports them as they grow and evolve their tech stack. This repositioning as an ongoing service provider that helps customers as they scale and evolve, significantly compounds their revenue generation and their predictable annual revenue.
“Even months after we’ve integrated Zesty into our customer’s environment, the experience still continues to be consistently positive.” Sergio Chavez – Head of Partnerships and Reselling
“We chose Zesty because of the significant savings that we could achieve with absolutely minimal effort involved.”
David Ting
Senior VP of Engineering
“Zesty has allowed us to reduce our overhead. We now have a zero point deviation from cost KPIs”
Manoj Srikantaiah
Lead DevOps Engineer
“The model is very transparent. The more we save, the more commission Zesty get for it, and that's something that works for us.”
Kinga Otffinowska
Engineering Manager at Bryter
