The Challenge

The numbers were staggering: $500,000 per month in infrastructure costs to support 13 concurrent players. The project was financially doomed without immediate intervention.

The team knew something was wrong but couldn’t identify the source. Costs had crept up gradually until they reached a breaking point. They needed expert eyes to diagnose the problem before the parent company pulled the plug.

Our Approach

We ran a focused 4-6 week infrastructure audit examining every component of their AWS deployment, DynamoDB usage, and matchmaker architecture.

What We Found

The $500K/month wasn’t a complex distributed systems problem—it was death by a thousand papercuts from configuration issues and cost leakage nobody was monitoring.

The smoking gun: A single misconfigured component was generating log entries saying “hey, this isn’t properly configured.” Each entry cost a fraction of a penny, but at massive scale, this one issue created $32,000 in storage costs alone.

Broader architecture inefficiencies compounded the problem:

• Oversized instance types for actual load
• Redundant data storage across services
• Missing cleanup policies for temporary data
• Inefficient query patterns generating unnecessary reads

The Results

We delivered actionable recommendations that created a path to financial viability.

• Root causes identified within weeks, not months
• Configuration fixes that could immediately reduce costs
• Architecture recommendations for sustainable scaling
• Project saved from cancellation

This became a favorite engagement because the business impact was immediate and measurable. The audit cost was recovered many times over through the cost leakage we identified.

Key Insight

Observability gaps kill projects. Nobody was watching costs at a granular level, so problems compounded invisibly until they became catastrophic. Regular cost audits and fine-grained monitoring aren’t overhead—they’re insurance against exactly this scenario.