How a Global Audio Services Pioneer Saved $300K+ Months with PointFive
$300K+
in AWS savings within months
5
major AWS services optimized including EC2, S3, EBS, EKS, and RDS
23
engineering teams engaged as active FinOps collaborators
“I can confidently say that PointFive supports our daily work by unifying the infrastructure, providing valuable and easily accessible analytical data to support decision-making.”
This U.S.-based global leader in audio technology has spent over 50 years redefining how the world experiences sound, from Hollywood blockbusters to today’s leading streaming platforms and consumer devices. Its breakthroughs in immersive and cinematic audio have become industry standards, trusted by creators, studios, and hardware makers alike.
Behind the scenes, the company’s AWS infrastructure supports engineering teams and real-time applications. As their cloud footprint grew, so did the need for a unified approach to cost efficiency.
For this, the company turned to PointFive. Within a few months, it achieved $300K in cloud cost savings across multiple AWS services by identifying waste across storage, compute, and Kubernetes environments. The team uncovered cold, unused S3 storage, flagged over 150 detached or inactive EBS volumes, and eliminated redundant EC2 instances and idle EKS clusters.
Outgrowing cost reporting
This company was no stranger to cloud cost monitoring. Their setup included a standalone cloud reporting application that helped engineers stay on budget. For a while, that was enough. But as pressure to reduce AWS cloud infrastructure costs increased, staying on budget wasn’t enough. Waste often gets built into architecture unintentionally, and traditional reporting tools don’t surface it.
In response, the company launched a dedicated FinOps program to support a more holistic approach to cloud efficiency. The program focused on continuous efficiency, targeted waste reduction, and infrastructure optimization. To achieve deeper savings, the team needed to move beyond surface-level metrics and uncover optimization opportunities their reporting solution couldn’t detect.
Their new goals required a platform that could identify, prioritize, and act on savings opportunities across their entire environment. It needed to provide comprehensive cloud visibility alongside practical optimization recommendations, and strengthen collaboration between engineering and FinOps teams by creating urgency and enabling action.
The shift from reporting to optimization
Integrating PointFive into their AWS environment enabled the customer to consolidate reporting and optimization into one application. PointFive’s DeepWaste detection engine surfaces hidden waste that their previous cloud reporting tool couldn’t detect. It connects findings to clear, actionable recommendations and delivers context directly into engineering workflows.
PointFive’s remediation guidance and 1-Click Remediation capabilities empower stakeholders to take quick action, turning insights into measurable savings. Teams don’t just know what to fix, they have the tools and context to fix it.
After adopting PointFive, the customer no longer needed to toggle between tools or dig through fragmented native services. The switch to a unified platform gave the team the visibility, clarity, and operational efficiency they needed to take action. With deeper visibility into the environment, they could scale FinOps efforts across teams and regions with greater agility and precision.
PointFive also became a centralized platform for identifying and aggregating cost-saving opportunities. With recommendations consolidated in one place, FinOps and engineering teams could simplify decision-making and prioritize work more effectively. The depth and breadth of recommendations supported day-to-day stakeholder conversations and helped teams move from analysis to execution.
Outcomes that matter
After adopting PointFive, the organization unlocked major efficiency gains.
Unified cost visibility and action: By consolidating reporting and optimization into one platform, the team eliminated data fragmentation and aligned FinOps and engineering on shared priorities. Integrated workflows ensured insights translated into action across teams, regions, and services.
Scalable FinOps across services: PointFive enabled the company to scale FinOps practices across EC2, S3, EBS, EKS, and RDS. Modules like Opportunities and Analytics made it easier to identify, prioritize, and execute high-impact changes, leading to faster remediation and sustained savings. This systematic approach quickly drove hundreds of thousands of dollars in savings.
Within a few months, the company achieved $300,000 dollars in cloud cost savings across multiple services.
Storage savings $24K/month
PointFive revealed just how much of the customer’s S3 storage was cold, unused data. By analyzing object-level storage usage and access patterns, it uncovered misaligned storage classes and stale files ready for cleanup.
EBS savings of $20K/month
PointFive analyzed attachment status and usage patterns to flag more than 150 virtual hard drive volumes that were detached, inactive, or unaccessed. This data helped the customer cut waste from their EBS environment by removing 150 unused volumes.
EC2 savings of $3K/month
Redundant virtual servers were driving up costs without delivering value. PointFive analyzed instance configurations, usage patterns, and system activity to surface underutilized or overlapping resources. The team removed those servers to reduce waste and eliminate unnecessary compute spend.
EKS savings of $2.5K/month
PointFive analyzed usage activity, resource allocation, and scaling patterns across the Kubernetes environment. It flagged unused clusters and outdated configurations that no longer aligned with demand. In response, the team deleted idle clusters and upgraded others to more efficient setups, cutting waste across their Kubernetes environments.
Several PointFive features proved essential:
Analytics Module
Provides flexible historical cost and usage data, along with custom visualizations for tracking trends and detecting anomalies. This capability supports daily FinOps operations. When deviations appear, the team notifies stakeholders to validate the change and determine whether action is needed.
Opportunities Module
This module receives the most attention. It allows the team to categorize opportunities by dimensions such as opportunity type or account, helping engineers address multiple recommendations at scale and reducing friction across teams.
Cost Savings Opportunities
Provides detailed inputs such as the financial impact of each change and estimated ROI timelines, making recommendations far more actionable than those from other tools. The clarity and depth help stakeholders understand trade-offs and prioritize what to address first.
Remediation Guidance
Delivers detailed recommendations, including context on resources involved, solution complexity, and priority level. Ready-to-use scripts integrate directly into Jira and ServiceNow workflows, reducing friction and accelerating execution.
By eliminating tool switching and fragmented analysis, PointFive gave the team the visibility and operational efficiency they needed to act.
Nubank
Nubank is one of the world's largest independent digital banks, serving over 100 million customers across Latin America. Headquartered in Brazil, the company operates a large and complex AWS environment that supports a broad portfolio of financial products and more than 7,000 engineers.
A Mature FinOps Practice Hit a Ceiling
Nubank spent years maturing its FinOps practice through internal initiatives and with the support of a well known Cloud Cost Management tool. The platform delivered meaningful value. Nubank gained visibility into cloud spend across accounts, regions, and services, improved budgeting and forecasting accuracy, and tracked cost units across the organization.
Each of Nubank's 50 business units had a dedicated Cost Champion responsible for managing cloud spend against budget. From a FinOps perspective, Nubank had done what many organizations are still working toward.
Despite this maturity, gaps remained. Cost Champions could see rising costs, spikes, and budget deviations, but they could not explain why those changes occurred. Reviewing budgets from current and prior years showed trends, not causes. Without root cause, teams could only react.
Suspected inefficiencies inside AWS were difficult to validate. Central Platform teams occasionally raised concerns, such as the use of incorrect database table classes, but those concerns often stalled. Without clear context, ownership, or an easy way to engage engineering teams, recommendations were hard to act on.
It became clear that Nubank was not missing visibility. It was missing causality, ownership, and a practical path to remediation.
Extending FinOps Beyond Visibility
Nubank adopted PointFive to extend its existing tooling, not replace it. The CCM platform remained the source of truth for cost transparency and reporting. PointFive focused on identifying inefficiencies and turning them into actionable remediation.
Once PointFive received read-only access to Nubank's AWS environment, it began detecting more than 200 types of waste across configuration, architecture, data lifecycle, and application behavior. Each opportunity appeared with estimated savings, risk level, remediation difficulty, and the full context required to validate the issue.
The results were immediate. By following PointFive's remediation workflows, Nubank engineers remediated enough waste to exceed the annual cost of PointFive in ten days (while still in the proof of concept).
Making Efficiency Actionable at Scale
Onboarding took less than a week. Nubank shared its internal AWS tagging structure, and PointFive's customer success team mapped resources to the correct business units, Cost Champions, and engineering owners. This ensured opportunities routed directly to accountable teams without creating additional work for Nubank.
PointFive's approach shifted efficiency ownership from a centralized FinOps function to the teams responsible for the infrastructure. Engineers saw opportunities tied directly to their resources, along with the context needed to validate them quickly and the ability to remediate through existing workflows in tools like Jira and ServiceNow.
Trust played a critical role in adoption. Engineers trusted PointFive's recommendations because they were specific, contextualized, and independently validated. Each opportunity clearly explained the root cause, the cost impact, the recommended remediation, and the associated risk.
Measurable Outcomes
Since adopting PointFive, Nubank has reduced its annual cloud spend by millions and lowered monthly cloud costs by approximately 5 percent. These results came not from one time cost cutting, but from sustained remediation at scale.
PointFive continues to detect more than 200 types of waste across Nubank's AWS environment, including misconfigured DynamoDB table storage classes, missing intelligent tiering on S3 buckets, suboptimal storage regions, inactive EBS volumes, and non archival data stored in non archival classes.
With more than 7,000 engineers, cost efficiency had historically competed with delivery, security, and compliance priorities. PointFive changed that dynamic. Engineers now engage directly with efficiency opportunities as part of their daily work, supported by clear ownership, trusted data, and simple remediation paths.
By extending its existing FinOps tooling with PointFive, Nubank moved beyond cost visibility to continuous cloud efficiency, where every team can see, validate, and resolve inefficiencies at speed.
PointFive redefines how enterprises continuously optimize cloud, infrastructure, and AI environments. By combining a real-time cloud and infrastructure data fabric with AI-driven detection and guided remediation, PointFive transforms efficiency from a reporting exercise into an operational discipline. Customers achieve sustained improvements in cost, performance, reliability, and engineering accountability, at scale.
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