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How Tellonym's CTO Runs $500K in AWS on Autopilot with Pump Save
~$500K
Annual AWS spend managed on autopilot
2
Years on Pump with zero manual commitment purchases
1
Engineer managing all DevOps and infrastructure
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Overview
"We've been using the autopilot feature, and besides the initial setup, it's been pretty hands-off. I don't have to think about which savings plans to buy or when they expire — it just runs. For a team where one person handles all of DevOps, that's exactly what we needed."
Max Fehmerling
Co-Founder & CTO
Tellonym is an anonymous Q&A and messaging app with over 13 million registered users, popular across Germany and Europe. The Berlin-based team of roughly 15 people has run its entire platform on AWS since 2017, when they joined the AWS Startup Program. With a single co-founder handling all DevOps and infrastructure, keeping cloud costs optimized without adding headcount is essential.
Industry
Social Media
Integrations
Location
Berlin, Germany
Pump services
Pump Save
Pump View
Use Case 1
From Expired Savings Plans to Always-On Autopilot
Before Pump, Tellonym's savings plan coverage was a manual process that Max managed alongside everything else. When a plan expired, he'd notice the cost spike, log into AWS, evaluate the options, and purchase a replacement — if he caught it in time. In one case, a $7.50/hour compute savings plan expired and coverage dropped below 40% before anyone intervened.
After joining Pump, Max enabled autopilot to handle savings plan purchases automatically based on Tellonym's usage patterns. The early days required some configuration work — as an early adopter, a few account settings weren't migrated correctly, and it took several months before autopilot was fully operational. But once the kinks were resolved, the system started managing commitments without Max's involvement. Savings plans now renew and adjust based on actual usage, and Max no longer tracks expiration dates or manually calculates commitment levels.
Use Case 2
Support Without Context Switching
Managing a $42,000-per-month AWS bill as a solo DevOps engineer means questions come up constantly — about unexpected charges, coverage gaps, or configuration issues. Before Pump, those questions went to AWS support, which meant navigating a separate portal and waiting for responses outside the tools Max already worked in.
Pump's Slack integration changed that workflow entirely. Because Tellonym already uses Slack for all internal communication, Max could raise questions, flag issues, and create support tickets directly from the channel his team already lives in. When he needed a cost allocation tag re-enabled or an old AWS account removed from his Pump dashboard, the turnaround happened in the same thread — no context switching, no separate ticketing portal. Max described the Slack-based support as a natural extension of how the team already communicates, rather than an additional tool to manage.
"The Slack integration is great, because we use Slack for all of our company internal communication. It was just an addition to that, so I can even do it from the gym." - Max Fehmerling, Co-Founder & CTO
Pump’s impact
Since enabling autopilot, Tellonym's savings plan coverage is managed entirely without manual intervention from Max. The days of discovering an expired plan through a cost spike — and then scrambling to purchase a replacement — are over. For a company spending roughly $42,000 per month on AWS, even modest coverage improvements translate to meaningful savings that compound over time.
Beyond the direct cost savings, Pump shifted how Max spends his time. As the only person responsible for DevOps at a 15-person company serving 13 million users, every hour spent managing cloud commitments is an hour not spent on product. With autopilot handling savings plans and Slack handling support, Max estimates he's reclaimed the equivalent of a recurring operational task that used to require active attention every few weeks.
Looking ahead, Tellonym is exploring Pump's new infrastructure recommendations and rightsizing features, which Max flagged as a priority in his most recent sync with his CSM. The team is also migrating AI workloads from OpenAI to AWS Bedrock, which will consolidate more spend under their AWS umbrella — and under Pump's optimization. Max expects the savings to grow as the infrastructure stabilizes and Pump's coverage deepens.