ASW Tutors Cuts Cloud Spend by 38% With Rightsizing and FinOps Guardrails

The Challenge

ASW Tutors, a rapidly growing math tutoring company, saw cloud costs grow unpredictably as they scaled their online learning platform and video conferencing infrastructure. Their engineering team lacked actionable visibility into spending, and environments accumulated over-provisioned instances, idle volumes, and zombie resources. Leadership needed a repeatable operating model to control spend without impacting the quality of their tutoring services.

The Solution

We established a FinOps practice and delivered measurable savings in four weeks:

Cost Visibility & Allocation — Unified AWS and GCP billing into a single normalized view with per-team cost allocation (by account/project and tags).

Optimization Playbook — Right-sized compute, implemented autoscaling and scheduled shutdowns for non-prod, and converted steady workloads to Savings Plans/Committed Use.

Guardrails & Policies — Enforced tagging, lifecycle policies for unattached volumes/snapshots, and budget alerts integrated into Slack.

Enablement — Built a lightweight catalog of optimization actions and embedded monthly reviews with clear owners and targets.

The Results

38% Reduction in Monthly Cloud Spend within two cycles, with no performance regressions.

>25% Coverage of steady workloads on long-term commitments (Savings Plans/CUDs).

Eliminated Zombie Resources via automated cleanup policies and tag compliance.

Predictable Budgeting with cost allocation by product and environment.

Key Takeaways

Sustainable savings require both one-time cleanup and ongoing governance.

Teams adopt cost hygiene faster when insights and actions are embedded in existing workflows.