Best Practices for SaaS Companies: Managing Cloud Costs and Optimizing Infrastructure Spend

The Trials and Tribulations of SaaS in 2025

Even with booming emerging technologies such as AI and AR/VR, SaaS companies are still continuing to grow. According to one study from Vena Solutions, “Worldwide SaaS revenue is expected to have an annual growth rate of 19.38% between 2025-2029, leading to a market volume of $793.10 billion by 2029.” SaaS platforms are constantly scaling and adding new users, leading to exponential growth in cloud costs and usage.

In 2025, container platforms such as Kubernetes continue to gain traction and are being used by more and more SaaS platforms. The nature of Kubernetes allows for rapid autoscaling services and allows developers to make faster deployments. With faster build times and automatic scaling of key infrastructure comes ever-increasing cloud costs. Managing cloud costs and resource utilization in real-time becomes more and more challenging.

Attributing costs to different teams, business units, and product lines becomes more critical as your team grows and SaaS platforms add on more and more functionality. New services and capabilities lead to more cloud utilization across numerous teams and departments and can cause a headache when trying to understand where your resources, time, and money are being spent. In 2025, cloud cost management and real-time optimization of resources will become more and more commonplace among every SaaS company.

So, without further ado, let’s investigate some of the upcoming trends in cloud cost management and best practices for SaaS companies to start paying attention to.

Current Cloud Cost Trends

Cloud costs can easily spike in numerous ways. Every SaaS business runs into scaling concerns and often needs to be able to manage multiple cloud providers and ever-changing pricing models. 

Here are just a few popular trends shaping cloud cost management in 2025:

• Usage-Based Pricing Gains Popularity: More cloud providers and SaaS tools are adopting granular usage-based and consumption-based pricing models, making it more difficult for SaaS companies to track consumption and overall spend and manage finances in real-time to avoid surprise bills.

• Multi-Cloud and Hybrid Cloud Strategies Grow: Companies are leveraging resources and services from all major cloud providers, leveraging different parts of AWS, Azure, and GCP to optimize performance in real-time and avoid vendor lock-in. However, managing resources across multiple cloud platforms introduces further complexity around controlling costs and understanding usage.

• AI-Driven Cost Increases and Optimization Opportunities: Increased adoption of machine learning and the rise in GenAI leads to even faster scaling of cloud costs. On the flipside, AI and ML in the cloud are also being used to help users analyze cloud usage patterns and recommend cost-saving measures before they hurt your bottom line.

The Evolution of FinOps

FinOps has become the gold standard practice for efficiently managing cloud spend. FinOps is a methodology that brings financial accountability to DevOps teams. Let’s have a look at the history of FinOps below.

As FinOps adoption has increased collaboration and accountability across teams, it has now evolved into an essential practice for SaaS companies looking to optimize cloud expenses.

Key Principles of FinOps

• Tight Collaboration Between Finance and Engineering Teams: Cloud cost management is no longer just a responsibility of the finance or DevOps team. Cross-functional collaboration ensures that costs are considered at every stage of the software development lifecycle, and that teams take more ownership over their cloud costs and usage.

• Real-Time Cloud Cost Monitoring: SaaS companies need to be adopting real-time dashboards and automated alerts ASAP. Higher visibility and actionable anomaly detection help prevent unexpected cost surges and lets teams resolve incidents faster.

• Unit Economics and Cost Allocation: Businesses are shifting towards detailed cost allocation tools like Amnic that track spend at the most granular levels – tracking dollars spent per feature, per customer, or per business unit. Unit economics shows the overall efficiency of your SaaS business and can help guide smarter resource allocation in the future.

• Automation and Control: Automated policies and controls are being implemented to optimize cloud resources in real time. Shutting down idle instances, rightsizing VMs and containers, and enforcing budget limits can help teams maintain operational efficiency in the cloud without any extra effort.

SaaS Considerations for Cloud Cost Management

Unlike traditional businesses, SaaS companies face unique cloud cost challenges due to their common rapid-scaling, multi-tenant architectures. Many SaaS tools run into high storage and compute demands, and many of these processes can never be downsized again. So, it’s important that you consider the following when managing cloud spend for a high-growth SaaS business:

• Cost Allocation and Shared Infrastructure: SaaS platforms are continuously serving multiple customers from a shared infrastructure, sometimes even across multiple clouds. Intelligent tagging strategies and cost allocation tools like Amnic ensure that cloud costs are allocated correctly to different cloud resources, customers, and/or product lines. Accurate cost allocation leads to more efficient investments into your cloud environments and brings more transparency to financial teams as to how the company is performing against budgets and financial forecasts.

• Optimizing Storage Costs: As SaaS companies generate vast amounts of data, cloud storage solutions (such as Amazon S3 buckets) can easily build up over time. Tiered storage systems can help optimize costs by automatically moving infrequently accessed data to lower-cost storage options.

• Network and Data Transfer Cost Management: Many SaaS businesses overlook network egress fees, which can add up quickly when transferring large volumes of data between cloud regions or providers. Optimizing API calls and leveraging CDNs can help reduce these expenses.

• Compute Costs: Compute costs are one of the biggest contributors to cloud costs when services autoscale out of control. SaaS companies can easily run into a spike in the usage of compute resources such as EC2, quickly leading to unexpected cloud bills. Tight management of compute resources can drive a massive reduction in cost without actually hindering end user experiences.   

Continuous Cost Optimization Tips for SaaS

Cost optimization is not a one-time exercise – it requires continuous monitoring and constant refinement. FinOps adoption leads to greater collaboration around the cost optimization practice and leads to a culture of shared ownership. In order to continuously drive cost optimization at your SaaS business, here are some proven strategies:

• Implement Autoscaling and Rightsizing: Both overprovisioned and underprovisioned resources lead to wasted spend and negative customer experiences. Autoscaling policies and rightsizing recommendations in a tool like Amnic can help you quickly match compute capacity to real-time demand.

• Leverage Reserved Instances and Savings Plans: For SaaS companies that run more predictable workloads, Reserved Instances (RIs) and Savings Plans can significantly reduce cloud expenses compared to on-demand pricing.

• Enable Tighter Cost Control and Management Policies: Amnic allows you to set budgets, configure cost alerts, monitor spending patterns, and take fast action to shut down unused resources to prevent overspending. A collaborative environment for cost control and visibility leads to a better understanding of your team’s cloud usage, driving more efficient decisions at every level.

• Regularly Audit and Optimize Cloud Spend: Weekly, monthly, and/or quarterly FinOps reviews can help you identify idle resources, misconfigured instances, and cost spikes, allowing teams to make data-driven decisions. Greater transparency brought through easily shared Amnic reports and dashboards can make this even easier. 

Examples of SaaS Success

MetaMap’s EC2 Cost Reduction by 33%

MetaMap’s Problem: MetaMap’s customer identity verification SaaS platform faces numerous challenges and a massive swath of data, especially as the business scales. Also, the processing of large amounts of data can easily drive unforeseen cloud costs, meaning that MetaMap needed a unified solution for monitoring and managing their cloud costs in real-time.

Who They Are: Founded in San Francisco in 2017, MetaMap has since become a global operation, trusted by 600+ global companies, building a scalable data platform that sources, integrates, and interprets a vast range of data for numerous types of businesses. With rapid growth, MetaMap quickly ran into soaring cloud costs. The team quickly identified the need for complete cloud cost observability and connected with Amnic to identify opportunities for optimization and drive more transparency around their FinOps practices.    

How They Benefit: By connecting to Amnic, MetaMap reduced Amazon EC2 costs while maintaining the high performance demanded by data-intensive processes and identity verification services.

What They Did:

• Rightsizing of Kubernetes Nodes and Pods: Amnic was able to provide observability into Metamap's Kubernetes environment, identifying opportunities for right-sizing nodes and pods to match workload requirements precisely.

• Optimal Mix of Spot and On-Demand Instances: Amnic was able to identify and make recommendations based on billing parameters around the strategic utilization of spot instances alongside on-demand instances. This allowed them to minimize spends without compromising performance or reliability.

• Optimization of EBS Volumes: Metamap optimized their Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes to align with actual storage needs, eliminating unnecessary expenses associated with over-provisioning.

• Implemented Amnic for Faster Debugging: Implemented Amnic’s agentless cloud cost observability tool to increase visibility and control so MetaMap could debug their costs faster and showcase the necessary changes for optimizing their existing workloads.

• Built a Roadmap for Migrating to EKS: Adopting Amnic provided the roadmap for migrating from self-managed Kubernetes to EKS, playing a huge role in streamlining costs and helping the MetaMap team run a lean cloud infrastructure.

Business Outcomes:

• Amazon EC2 expenses dropped by 33%, enabling the business to invest more in next-level data analytics and biometric security capabilities.

• Improved cloud performance consistency and efficiency, elevating MetaMap’s reputation for reliable, scalable solutions in sensitive identity services.

• With a clearer understanding of real-time Kubernetes usage at the individual resource level, DevOps engineers collaborated more quickly around recommended optimizations. This constant visibility not only unlocked deeper optimizations but also empowered engineers to propose cost-saving measures without undermining system reliability.

Key Stat: MetaMap achieved a 33% reduction in EC2 costs within half a year.

Compute resources are more and more important as systems scale and our software begins to process larger, more complex datasets. The growth of GenAI and other compute-intensive operations can easily cause cloud costs to spiral out of control. Control your costs and reduce EC2 spend by 33% or more with a tool like Amnic. 

LambdaTest’s 30% Reduction in NAT and CloudWatch Costs

LambdaTest’s Problem: LambdaTest is a SaaS platform in the developer cross-browser testing tool market, which continues to see major growth due to the prevalence of web functionality across various browsers, devices, and use cases. With this growth comes unpredictable cloud bills that can easily spiral out of control. LambaTest needed a way to continuously optimize its cloud resources and quickly detect any unusual uptick in cloud usage or spend. The LambaTest team needed a single pane of glass into their cloud’s efficiency.

Who They Are: LambaTest is a continuous quality testing SaaS-based cloud platform that helps developers and testers ship code faster. Its browser and app testing cloud platform allows users to run both manual and automated tests of web and mobile apps across 3,000+ browsers, real devices, and operating systems. This scale demands cross-functional transparency around cloud costs and resource utilization, leading to greater FinOps adoption and enhanced cloud efficiency.

How They Benefit: The adoption of Amnic gave LambaTest the ability to quickly visualize and optimize its network costs. With greater visibility and cost control, LambaTest was able to monitor spending patterns more closely and take action around recommendations without sacrificing the reliability or observability that’s crucial for continuous development workflows.

What They Did:

• NAT Gateway Optimization: Audited NAT gateway usage, consolidating redundant gateways and channeling traffic where it mattered most. This prevented unnecessary per-gateway costs.

• Optimization of Network Costs Through Better Visualization: Amnic provided LambdaTest with enhanced visualization tools, allowing it to gain deeper insights into network usage patterns and identify more opportunities for optimization.

• Identifying Opportunities to Lower Bills Such as CloudWatch Costs: Observability across services beyond cost visibility provided by cloud providers allowed LambdaTest to track their CloudWatch expenses at the most granular level. Amnic was pivotal in identifying costs and recommending strategies to reduce overall costs.

• Enhanced Reporting Workflows and Dashboards: The 360-degree visibility provided by Amnic allowed LambaTest to enhance its financial reporting cadence and improve cost visualizations with Amnic’s dashboards, helping the entire team identify improvements to cost governance more quickly.

Business Outcomes:

• Achieved a 30% drop in NAT costs and CloudWatch spend, enhancing overall operational efficiency. Freed up more capital to be directed toward future platform enhancements and ensure uptime without unnecessary overhead.

• Maintained high availability and more performant services at a fraction of the cost, enabling developers to work more efficiently without incurring hidden costs.

• Refined NAT usage gave engineers more control over how they routed data through their development, staging, and production environments. With a sharper focus on cost observability, teams could more quickly diagnose performance issues, ensuring they spent less time sifting through complex financial reports.

Key Stat: LambdaTest reported a 30% reduction in NAT and CloudWatch expenses after consolidating gateways and optimizing metrics.

With the help of cost observability through Amnic, LambdaTest has reduced network and CloudWatch costs by 30%, helping the organization achieve a more modern culture of cloud FinOps. 

Staying on Top of Your Cloud Infrastructure Costs

As SaaS companies like yours continue to scale throughout 2025, cloud cost management will continue to be a key factor in maintaining profitability and operational efficiency. The rise in FinOps adoption, real-time cost monitoring, and AI-driven tools have made it easier than ever to track and control cloud expenses, even as incurring cloud expenses also becomes easier. So, proactive planning and collaboration across finance, engineering, and product teams is even more essential to keeping costs down while maintaining operational efficiency.

By staying on top of current cloud cost trends, implementing robust FinOps practices, and continuously optimizing infrastructure spend, SaaS companies can quickly ensure they’re not only keeping costs under control but also driving the right investments across their entire cloud ecosystem.

Don’t hesitate to sign up for a 30-day free trial of Amnic or reach out for a personalized demo to learn how a holistic cloud cost observability platform can help you reduce costs and improve the efficiency of your cloud infrastructure.