Overview
Crownpeak is a SaaS-based marketing technology leader that helps customers deliver optimized digital experiences through enterprise-grade content management, product discovery, and compliance solutions. Their products help global brands meet regulatory compliance, increase conversion, and enhance on-site search.
As Crownpeak scaled its product lines and customer base, one strategic priority became increasingly clear: extracting greater value from every dollar spent in the cloud while continuing to deliver exceptional service to customers. That responsibility sits with Pavel Bushmelev, Vice President of Platform and AI.
Pavel leads Crownpeak’s cloud and AI strategy, building a cloud infrastructure that accelerates development in a cost-effective manner while advancing AI-powered features and innovation across the business. But as cloud usage grew, one major bottleneck began consuming too much of his time: managing AWS commitments manually.
“It was my almost daily task to ensure that our reserved instances match our actual consumption and adjust them accordingly by hand.”
That’s when Pavel and his team turned to ProsperOps’ Autonomous Discount Management (ADM) to take commitment management off their plate and reclaim strategic focus.
Navigating mergers and seasonality with manual commitment management
Crownpeak’s cloud-native infrastructure spans compute, databases, and storage—primarily on AWS, with some workloads on Google Cloud. At the heart of Crownpeak’s cost optimization challenges was commitment management—the task of buying and maintaining Reserved Instances (RIs) to reduce AWS spend.
Early on, the team had to handle it manually, reviewing usage reports, chasing down cross-functional teams, and purchasing commitments. At different times, the team tried to stay on top of it but it was unsustainable. This already time-consuming process became more difficult as the business evolved.
Growth increased commitment complexity
As the business grew, Crownpeak had to integrate multiple AWS accounts and workloads under a single cloud cost strategy. This meant reconciling billing, consolidating infrastructure, and aligning different types of commitments (Reserved Instances and Savings Plans) across a larger, more diverse usage profile.
Without automation, the team faced a serious risk: previously purchased commitments could quickly become mismatched with actual usage, leading to wasted spend or gaps in coverage. And revising that commitment strategy manually, while in the middle of a high-stakes business integration, would have required significant time and expertise.
Seasonal spikes made optimization even harder
Crownpeak also deals with seasonal demand surges, particularly during Q4, as retail and e-commerce customers ramp up for Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Boxing Day. After the holiday season, usage falls back to baseline levels.
Matching commitments to these fluctuating patterns is critical to avoid on-demand spend or undercoverage. But with only manual tools and limited internal bandwidth, keeping commitments aligned with seasonal usage was nearly impossible.
An internal tool that fell short
As commitment management demands grew, Crownpeak attempted to solve the problem internally by building a custom solution in-house. But the system still required significant manual oversight and lacked the adaptability to respond to shifting usage patterns through mergers, acquisitions, and seasonal spikes.
“Even with the solution we built in-house, it was also still nearly a full-time job for one person to maintain commitments at the right levels of coverage. There’s definitely an opportunity cost in trying to manage commitments manually.”
The opportunity cost was significant: valuable time spent optimizing AWS costs meant less time spent delivering platform capabilities, driving AI strategy, or workload optimization.
The turning point: Continuously optimized AWS commitments with ProsperOps
Crownpeak adopted ProsperOps’ Autonomous Discount Management (ADM) to maximize cloud savings and keep commitments flexible, while reclaiming the team’s time to focus on other strategic priorities.
“ProsperOps gives us peace of mind. We don’t have to constantly check whether our commitments align with usage—it’s taken care of. As our workloads change, ProsperOps adapts commitments automatically. Without it, we’d have to either assign someone to manage this full-time or build and maintain a system ourselves. It’s one of the most reliable tools we have for cost optimization.”
Today, Crownpeak manages FinOps through a lean, cross-functional team led by Pavel Bushmelev, alongside the VP of Engineering, product operations lead, and finance. This central group oversees rate optimization using ProsperOps. Cloud costs are allocated to product lines, with product managers accountable for usage and profitability. Engineering leads also review development costs to identify workload optimization opportunities. This structure enables tight cost control while aligning financial accountability across teams and business outcomes.
Adaptive Laddering provides flexibility to maintain optimal coverage through seasonal spikes and mergers
Pavel noted that one of the most valuable aspects is ProsperOps’ Adaptive Laddering strategy, in which commitments are purchased in small, frequent increments over time with regular expirations. This prevents lock-in risk from long-term batch purchases and keeps coverage flexible and adaptive to usage changes.
Net Savings Trend shows consistently high ESR even during seasonal spikes
Adaptive Laddering strategy has proven especially useful during seasonal demand spikes like Black Friday and even more during mergers. ProsperOps’ ADM automatically scales up commitment coverage as usage grows during peak periods to avoid costly on-demand rates, and then scales down as demand subsides.
When Crownpeak merged with another company and inherited AWS accounts not yet under ProsperOps, a team was manually reviewing and adjusting commitments each month. Once those accounts were brought under ProsperOps, ADM made it possible to absorb and optimize commitments across newly acquired accounts automatically, freeing up valuable operational resources right when they were needed most.
“The biggest win was when a group of people—tasked with monthly review and manual adjustments of commitments after merger—no longer had to do it. For a while, they couldn’t believe it.”
Spend Coverage Trend during seasonal spikes: Commitment coverage automatically scales up and down based on usage
Achieving high savings with low commitment lock-in
Since implementing ADM for AWS six years back, Crownpeak has seen millions in AWS savings. Their Effective Savings Rate (ESR), a key indicator they use to understand how much lower they are paying for services compared to list pricing, increased from 22.8% to 38.6%-—a 70% increase.
Using ProsperOps, Crownpeak also maintains a low commitment lock-in of just 5.5 months, a meaningful contrast to traditional multi-year commitment strategies. This level of commitment flexibility allows the business to adapt quickly to changing infrastructure needs or business scenarios like M&A.
Beyond low lock-in risk, Pavel values that Crownpeak owns its commitments outright, with ProsperOps managing them on their behalf.
ADM’s Savings and Commitments Dashboard provides detailed visibility into metrics like ESR, Commitment Lock-In Risk (CLR), total savings, and more. Pavel highlighted it as a valuable tool for internal reporting, making it easy to demonstrate exactly how much was saved and what actions ProsperOps took to achieve it.
Final Thoughts
With ProsperOps automating commitment management, Crownpeak’s FinOps efforts are now focused on workload optimization through right-sizing resources and reducing waste across environments.
This also allows Pavel to stay focused on his core responsibilities: driving the strategic alignment of Crownpeak’s cloud infrastructure and AI platforms. With ProsperOps in place, Crownpeak can meet its strategic goal of getting more value out of every dollar spent without any additional overheads.
