New York, USA, April 28th, 2026, FinanceWire
Hygraph, a leading headless content management platform, has reduced its AWS CloudFront expenditure by 66% following a targeted cloud cost optimization engagement with Automat-it, a specialist AWS FinOps and managed services partner. The partnership delivered transformative results within a seven-month window, generating over $8,000 in combined monthly savings and enabling the business to meet critical year-end financial targets without compromising operational flexibility.
The outcome reflects a growing reality for scaling technology companies: cloud infrastructure costs, left unmanaged, can erode gross margins faster than product revenue can compensate. For Hygraph, the pressure was acute. CloudFront spend was already significant and projected to rise further. Internal teams suspected waste existed within the environment but lacked the granular visibility needed to act on it. Leadership had set firm gross margin targets with a hard year-end deadline, leaving little room for prolonged analysis or trial and error.
Hygraph, headquartered in Germany, powers content operations for businesses managing and distributing content across diverse digital channels. Its headless CMS enables teams to structure content at scale and launch faster with AI capabilities built for reliability and control. As the platform expanded its customer base, the infrastructure demands supporting it grew in parallel, making cost efficiency a strategic priority rather than a secondary concern.
The Challenge
The financial pressure Hygraph faced was not simply a matter of trimming discretionary spend. CloudFront represented one of the company’s primary infrastructure cost drivers, and the trajectory was heading in the wrong direction. Without intervention, the spend would continue to climb through the remainder of the financial year, making the gross margin target increasingly difficult to reach.
Compounding the challenge was the company’s position mid-transition. Hygraph was working through internal architectural changes intended to lower costs over the longer term, but those changes take time to validate and implement. In the interim, the business needed a way to control costs without locking itself into commitments that could conflict with the new architecture once it was in place. Flexibility was not optional. It was a core requirement of any solution.
“As our cloud costs continued to grow, and with CloudFront spend expected to rise further over the course of the year, we needed both immediate relief and a sound longer-term approach. Automat-it helped us quickly reduce CloudFront cost pressure and supported us with additional compute Savings Plans while we worked through internal architectural changes aimed at lowering costs further,” said Pablo Fernandez Busch, Hygraph’s VP of Engineering.
The Solution
Automat-it approached the engagement with a structured FinOps strategy designed to deliver savings at multiple levels simultaneously, without disrupting Hygraph’s ability to adapt its infrastructure.
The first and most immediately impactful step was securing a Private Pricing Addendum for CloudFront. This negotiated arrangement delivered a direct reduction to Hygraph’s largest single cost driver, producing visible savings from the outset of the engagement.
In parallel, Automat-it took over management of Hygraph’s AWS Savings Plans. This included a strategic shift from one-year to three-year commitments for approximately 75% of compute spend, a move that significantly improved the long-term savings profile without overcommitting resources the business was still evaluating. For the remaining spend, Automat-it maintained additional Savings Plans to preserve the flexibility Hygraph needed during its architectural transition.
Ongoing lifecycle management formed the third pillar of the solution. As existing Savings Plans reached expiry, Automat-it topped them up and renewed them to ensure cost efficiency continued uninterrupted. Commitments were also consolidated to align on shared future end dates, reducing the administrative burden on Hygraph’s internal team while improving overall financial returns.
The Results
The engagement produced immediate and sustained financial outcomes across every dimension the two teams had targeted.
CloudFront costs fell by 66%, the single largest reduction in Hygraph’s infrastructure spend profile. Total monthly savings exceeded $8,000, drawn from two sources: approximately $1,250 per month from Savings Plans directly managed by Automat-it, and a further $7,000 per month from Hygraph’s own commitments structured under the new approach. Hygraph met its year-end gross margin targets, delivering on a top-priority objective for company leadership.
Beyond the headline numbers, the engagement enabled something equally valuable: continuity. Hygraph was able to proceed with its architectural transition on its own timeline, validating the new setup without financial pressure forcing premature decisions on long-term commitments. Once the new architecture was confirmed, the company was positioned to configure its own Savings Plans with full confidence in the structure best suited to its needs.
“Their support was especially valuable during the transition, giving us the flexibility to operate efficiently in the short term while we validated the new setup and determined the Savings Plans structure best suited to our architecture,” Busch said.
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