Overview
- Client: Fanatics Commerce
- Industry: Sports Retail
- Cloud Provider: AWS
- Key Services: EC2, S3, RDS, EKS
Fanatics Commerce, a global distributor of officially licensed sports merchandise, had already built a mature FinOps practice. But despite structured reporting across their AWS footprint, cloud costs kept climbing -- particularly in EC2, S3, and RDS. Leadership needed a way to turn cost visibility into cost action.
The Challenge
Operating at the "Run" stage of FinOps maturity, Fanatics Commerce had cost management protocols in place but struggled to convert identified inefficiencies into concrete fixes. The biggest blind spot was their EKS infrastructure: pooled cluster deployments made it nearly impossible to trace costs at the instance level, and optimization opportunities went unaddressed.
The team needed a platform that could:
- Surface optimization opportunities across all AWS service categories
- Reduce the time engineers spent investigating issues before remediation
- Route recommendations directly to the responsible engineering teams
The Solution
Fanatics Commerce deployed PointFive to close the gap between cost reporting and cost reduction. The implementation required minimal effort, and within weeks the platform uncovered previously undetected savings opportunities.
Analytics Module -- Delivered flexible, granular reporting segmented by service type and operational tier, giving the team a deeper view into where costs were accumulating.
Opportunities Module -- Identified concrete savings possibilities, including EBS volumes attached to stopped EC2 instances and dormant CloudWatch log groups that had gone unnoticed by existing tooling.
The recommendations were immediately actionable. Fanatics Commerce assigned ownership, prioritized remediation by financial impact, and consolidated all optimization work into a single platform -- eliminating the need to switch between multiple dashboards.
Results
PointFive centralized all optimization guidance while providing clear visibility into complex infrastructure like EKS. The platform shifted the team's posture from passive cost monitoring to active cost reduction.
- Faster Action: Ranked remediation recommendations accelerated handoff to the right engineering teams
- Time Savings: Engineers redirected hours previously spent gathering optimization data from scattered sources toward higher-value work
- Deeper Insights: PointFive surfaced underperforming resources that earlier tooling had missed
- EKS Visibility: Granular cost tracing within pooled EKS clusters exposed previously hidden waste
Conclusion
PointFive elevated Fanatics Commerce's already sophisticated FinOps framework by shifting the emphasis from documenting expenditures to systematically reducing them -- with greater speed and confidence.