MASTERREMIT
Cutting a fintech platform's infra bill by 73%
Re-architected a fragile single-account AWS setup into isolated, IaC-managed environments, security up, bill down 73%.
Problem
A growing fintech platform ran everything in one AWS account: dev, staging, and production sharing blast radius, no infrastructure-as-code, and a deployment process that made every release a risk. Costs sat near AUD 4,500/month for an environment nobody fully trusted.
Approach
I split the estate into isolated dev/staging/production accounts with private VPC networking and ALBs, and codified all of it in Terraform so environments became reproducible instead of hand-tuned. In parallel I rebuilt core internal systems (compliance CMS, support tooling, transaction management) in Laravel, with a database redesign for scalability, and tightened the CI/CD pipeline.
Result
Infrastructure spend dropped from ~AUD 4,500/mo to ~AUD 1,200/mo across three isolated environments, with materially stronger security and deployment reliability. The platform went from fragile-and-expensive to reproducible-and-cheap.
A single-account AWS environment is a liability in fintech, shared blast radius, no reproducibility, and a bill that grows faster than the value behind it. The win here wasn’t a clever optimisation; it was discipline applied as architecture: separate the environments, codify them, and let reproducibility do the cost-cutting.