All case studies
How Zil Money Cut 15–20% of Their AWS Bill Without Long-Term Commitments with Pump Save
15–20%
Monthly AWS bill reduction
8–10 hrs
Saved monthly on manual cost reporting
Boost your global cloud visibility and control with Pump. Share your email for details!
By submitting your email, you agree to opt in to marketing emails.
Overview
"If you want real cloud savings without locking into long-term commitments, Pump is worth it. We've saved over $13K since joining and it didn't cost us any flexibility. What surprised me was how much more it does beyond cost optimization - the visibility into exactly what's driving spend, anomaly alerts before they hit the monthly bill, and compliance tooling we didn't expect to get from a cost platform."
Akshay Thacholi
DevOps Engineer
Zil Money is a fintech platform built to simplify every payment a business makes, from checks and ACH to wire transfers and virtual cards. The 150-person team is headquartered in San Jose, CA, and runs its full payment infrastructure on AWS. As a fintech handling financial transactions at scale, keeping cloud costs predictable and secure isn't optional - it's operational.
Industry
Fintech
Integrations
Location
San Jose, CA
Pump services
Pump Save
Pump View
Pump Secure
Use Case 1
Spend Visibility Without the Manual Work
For Akshay and the AWS team, the most immediate change Pump made was eliminating the manual work of understanding where money was going. Instead of building queries in Cost Explorer or pulling exports to figure out which services, environments, or workloads were driving costs, the AWS team now has a clear breakdown in the dashboard - without building anything from scratch.
When finance or leadership asks why spend moved last week, the answer is already there. What used to mean half a day of digging through billing reports now takes minutes. Finance pulls reports when they need them without pinging the AWS team, and leadership has ongoing cost visibility without anyone having to build a deck or schedule a walkthrough.
Use Case 2
Catching Cost Spikes Before the Monthly Bill
Before Pump, cost anomalies showed up when the bill did - at month-end, after the damage was done. Pump changed that by flagging unusual usage and sudden cost increases within hours, giving the AWS team a window to act before a misconfigured resource or runaway workload compounds into a real problem.
The team has used anomaly detection to catch cost spikes early on multiple occasions. In one instance, during a routine review, Pump surfaced AWS resources that were still running despite no longer being needed - quietly adding unnecessary costs that would have gone unnoticed until the next monthly statement. Catching those kinds of issues early, rather than after the fact, is now a core part of how the AWS team operates.
"It's easy for small unused resources to quietly increase monthly costs. Pump catches them before they add up."
- Akshay T, AWS Engineer
Use Case 3
Compliance Visibility the Team Didn't Expect
Zil Money came to Pump for cost optimization and got something they didn't anticipate: a clear picture of their security and compliance posture. Pump Secure ran a SOC 2 scan and surfaced findings with a remediation plan the team could actually act on - no back-and-forth, no ambiguity about next steps.
For a fintech managing payment infrastructure, SOC 2 compliance isn't a box to check once and forget. The AWS team now uses Pump to track and maintain their compliance requirements as part of their regular workflow, alongside cost monitoring and anomaly detection. It turned what started as a cost tool into the single platform connecting their cost optimization, visibility, and compliance.
Pump’s impact
Since joining Pump in January 2025, Zil Money has saved over $13,000 on their AWS bill - roughly 15–20% of their monthly spend - without locking into a single Reserved Instance commitment. For a fintech whose infrastructure needs shift with usage, that flexibility matters as much as the savings figure itself.
Beyond the cost reduction, Pump changed how the AWS team operates day to day. Manual cost reviews, reactive anomaly hunting, and ad-hoc reporting to finance have been replaced by a dashboard the team checks regularly and reports that go out automatically. The 8–10 hours a month the team used to spend on manual cost work is now spent on higher-priority engineering instead.
What started as a cost optimization platform has expanded into Zil Money's primary tool for spend visibility, anomaly detection, and SOC 2 compliance tracking. As the team looks ahead, they're planning to go deeper on security monitoring and alerts - and are closely watching Pump's upcoming rightsizing feature to identify over-provisioned resources and trim further from the bill.