Case Study: Drift cuts $2.4M from AWS costs with CloudZero

How Drift Improved Their COGS by $2.4 Million

Drift, a MarTech SaaS company, needed a better way to understand its cloud cost of goods sold (COGS) as rapid feature growth—especially machine-learning-driven functionality—caused unpredictable AWS bills. Despite manual tagging and a dedicated “COGS Hunters” task force, the team struggled to attribute spending to specific products and features, which made it difficult to make informed engineering and finance decisions. CloudZero was brought in to help Drift gain clearer visibility into its AWS costs.

Using CloudZero, Drift automatically attributed AWS spend to products and features, improved tagging coverage, and gave engineering and finance a shared, proactive view of cost trends. The result was up to $2.4 million in annual AWS savings, including $200,000 in monthly savings, and an 80% reduction in the cost of one top feature. CloudZero also helped Drift build a more trustworthy relationship with finance, reduce manual cost-management work, and make smarter product and packaging decisions.

Drift

Freedom Dumlao

Chief Architect