Paying by the minute: when pay-per-use starts costing you more than money

Most of the stuff that causes friction in a business announces itself via breakages, customer complaints or missed deadlines. You see the problem, and then you fix it.

But there is a more subtle loss of time and money happening in the background. These are things that were chosen at the time for their cost-effectiveness, but that are now outdated – and it’s slipped past you that a better way is available.

The only way to find these losses is to consciously search for them. We make a point of looking at our own setup regularly, the same way we do for clients during an audit. Here’s what our most recent search turned up.

What we found

For every bit of new code we write, we add automated tests to ensure everything is working reliably – before it even gets to the manual testing stage. This is a non-negotiable for us, regardless of the cost. However, we still want to do it in the most cost-efficient way possible.

And we realised that where we were running the tests was costing us much more than it needed to. We were renting capacity from a cloud provider and paying for it by the minute.

Initially, this made financial sense for us. But as our usage has grown heavier, renting by the minute has stopped being the most economical option.

So we decided to buy our own machine and bring it in-house. We can now run tests on every commit without increasing the cost. Spare capacity runs internal microservices we’d otherwise have been renting elsewhere – now it’s just hardware we’ve already paid for, doing a second job.

It’s not about hardware

For the majority of businesses, buying a server isn’t the answer. But what is helpful is a reminder to regularly look at your internal systems and check whether the choices you carefully made previously are still the best options for your business – making sure the less-obvious friction gets caught. Auditing needs to be something you schedule, not something you wait to be prompted to do.

Common hiding places

The best place to look is anywhere your circumstances have grown but the arrangement hasn’t moved with them:

• Per-seat licences bought when you were a team of six, still renewing now you’re a team of 20
• Per-transaction fees that were rounding errors at your old volume and aren’t any more
• Storage or usage tiers on a plan that no longer matches your needs
• Support contracts sized for a business that no longer looks like yours

All things that can easily go unnoticed if you aren’t looking for them.

A fresh pair of eyes

If you’re thinking that your business could do with a systems audit but don’t really know where to start, we can help with that part.

We understand that as your business evolves, your systems often need to as well, so we offer free process audits to help you see what’s working for you and what could benefit from a change. No obligations – just a fresh pair of eyes to help spot things that slip through the net.

Give us a call on 01637 222001.