Customer story · FinTech · Anonymized
38% cost reduction
on monthly AWS spend
One engineer set up Refine in an afternoon. Anomaly detection caught a runaway Lambda before our weekly review.
By HabileLabs
$22.4k
Monthly AWS spend (before)
$13.9k
Monthly AWS spend (after)
$102k
Annualized savings
1 engineer · 1 afternoon
Engineering effort
FinTech · This story is anonymized at the customer's request. Numbers and outcomes are real; identifying details have been changed.
The problem
What they were dealing with
A Series-A FinTech startup was three months into a serverless rebuild. The monthly bill had been climbing $1.5k/mo without any obvious cause. The CTO suspected a misconfigured Lambda function but had no way to confirm without a multi-day investigation. The team had no FinOps engineer; everyone was shipping product.
Their compliance officer separately flagged that an upcoming Series-B raise would trigger a security review. The team needed posture visibility without buying an enterprise CNAPP they could not afford and could not staff.
The approach
How they used Refine
The CTO set up Refine on a Friday afternoon. The IAM role took 90 seconds to create. Refine's first scan completed in 4 minutes — meaningful first-pass recommendations, plus 47 security findings, were ready before he signed off for the weekend.
The narrative report flagged Lambda spend as the top cost driver. Drilling in, Refine showed one function — a nightly report generator — had been invoked at 2.5× its normal volume for the past 9 days. A misconfigured event rule had caused it. The fix was a one-line CloudWatch change.
- 90-second IAM role setup, 4-minute first scan
- Anomaly detection caught the runaway Lambda before it compounded
- Closed 3 Critical security findings (IAM key rotation, S3 bucket ACL, unencrypted EBS volume)
- Enabled "Fix Available" remediation for 8 misconfigurations
- Configured Slack-ready email routing (Slack integration roadmap)
- Tag governance rolled out across 4 production accounts
The result
38% cost reduction · $8,500 / month saved
After the Lambda fix and 5 right-sizing recommendations on RDS, the monthly bill dropped 38% — $8,500/mo recovered. The Optimization Score climbed from 52 to 81 over six weeks. Anomaly detection became a routine signal: a weekly Monday-morning email summarizing the previous week's anomalies, most often acknowledged as expected, occasionally catching the kind of thing that would have surprised the team mid-month.
Three months later, the Series-B due diligence went smoothly. All three Critical security findings the auditor would have flagged had already been closed. The compliance officer used Refine's exported reports as evidence. The CTO no longer reads the AWS bill — Refine reads it and tells him what changed.
"The runaway Lambda would have shown up as a $4k surprise on the invoice. Catching it on day 2 — with a plain-English explanation of what was happening — was worth the setup time several times over."
— CTO, FinTech (anonymized)
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Refine is built and supported by HabileLabs, an AWS Advanced Tier Services Partner.