Advanced SaaS Production Costs

One of the things I am good at is lowering production costs, especially in software products. This comes from almost 30 years of software engineering experience.

As a result, this newsletter's new focus will be on SaaS production cost reduction. In the next few days, I will add a paid section with in-depth technical articles while continuing free articles with more high-altitude overviews.

While most of these measures involve alterations to the hosting environment, the best ones focus on the development process.

For example, while building early AI systems, the cost of GPUs was beyond our budget. Instead of dealing with slow performance, I switched the focus from processor to memory, as hosted RAM is far less expensive than hosted video processors.

My old HP calculator inspired me to perform memory-intensive calculations using the minimum amount of processing power. Starting in the 1970s, Hewlett Packard made calculators capable of advanced calculations with rudimentary processors. They did this with a few clever tricks on the stack. We just copied their genius.

Another fun trick is throwing away unneeded data. While building a near real-time tracking system for marketers, I architected a method to discard erroneous data at the time of collection. This reduced processor usage and database storage costs and made the system capable of tracking millions of users each second.

In another instance, my team turned a $20,000 monthly AWS bill into a $2500 one. We did this by replacing the high-cost database products with text files on S3. While many use this tactic to reduce costs, we found that it also made it faster to analyze non-relational data.

If you would like to reduce SaaS production costs or just learn tricks for cost savings while developing new products, this is the place for you.