How to cut platform costs without slowing growth

Optimizing platform efficiency is not just about cutting costs, it’s about ensuring scalable, sustainable growth. That’s exactly what Flowbox achieved. At a recent Viking Growth best practice session, Raghunath Vasireddy (Rag), Head of Technology at Flowbox, shared how his team reduced infrastructure costs by nearly 50% while continuing to grow their customer base by 24%.

In this article, we break down the strategy, key frameworks, and lessons from Flowbox’s journey to financial efficiency. This playbook offers scale-ups a way to balance growth with profitability.

Combining growth and profitability

For years, Flowbox has been built for speed and scale. As a UGC management and influencer marketing platform, the company had rapidly expanded across Europe, onboarding new customers and handling high traffic from global brands.

Growing ARR is essential for any SaaS company, but growth alone is not enough. To make it sustainable, you also need to scale with efficiency. With rising hosting costs, shifting market dynamics, and post-COVID fluctuations in sales, it became clear that Flowbox needed to refocus. The new goal was to strengthen EBITDA while continuing to drive innovation.

Multi-phase platform cost optimization

Recognizing the need to adapt, Flowbox launched a multi-phase cost optimization project. The team conducted a full audit of the platform architecture from top to bottom, including infrastructure spend and feature usage, as well as vendor agreements and their impact on the customer experience.

Step 1: Build full cost visibility

Flowbox began by implementing a cloud cost intelligence tool to centralize visibility across all hosting environments. This revealed hidden costs and inefficiencies, including redundant storage snapshots, underutilized compute instances, and costly data transfer fees. Thus, Flowbox could visualize where every krona went.

Step 2: Drive cross-functional cost decisions

Cost reduction wasn’t just a tech exercise it was a company-wide initiative. Flowbox aligned Tech, Product, and Finance to make data-driven decisions across three pillars:

• Tech: Re-engineer and optimize infrastructure.
• Product: Re-evaluate feature experience vs. operational cost.
• Finance: Revisit commitments and vendor contracts for discounts.

With an holistic approach, they ensured cost savings were balanced with customer experience and scalability.

Step 3: Technical re-engineering for efficiency

The engineering team focused on re-architecting high-impact areas of the platform to reduce cost while maintaining or improving performance.

• Caching: Introduced multi-layer caching closer to APIs, significantly reducing load on databases and Lambda executions.
• Compute optimization: Re-balanced job frequencies, reduced concurrency, and implemented smarter autoscaling across Kubernetes clusters.
• Database efficiency: Deployed search engines for read-heavy operations, cutting RDS instance sizes from 8x to 1x.
• Networking improvements: Redesigned NAT gateway usage with proxy Lambdas to minimize external traffic costs.
• Centralized observability: Adopted New Relic for unified monitoring, adding short-term cost, but enabling faster optimization and incident response.

These infrastructure changes alone led to a significant reduction in hosting costs, while simultaneously improving system speed, stability, and scalability.

Step 4: Product trade-offs that paid off

Flowbox also challenged its product assumptions. A major cost driver was real-time social media syncing. Previously, posts were fetched every 30 seconds. After analyzing customer usage, the team extended the interval and added a two-hour cache for website updates. They also killed low-ROI add-ons used by < 5% of clients, redefined which features truly drove value for customers, and ensured they were scalable. The result was the same great user experience at a fraction of the compute cost.

Step 5: Smart financial levers

Flowbox’s finance team joined forces with a hosting partner to secure 15–20% discounts on their cloud spend. They also introduced reserved instance commitments and upfront payments for stable workloads, cutting some resource costs by up to 40%. Experimenting with new CDN providers further improved cost efficiency while maintaining global performance.

The results of cutting platform costs

Flowbox now operates a scalable, optimized platform, one where costs no longer grow proportionally with new clients. The achievement was accomplished without downtime, performance loss, or slowed customer acquisition, resulting in a 47% total cost reduction alongside 24% client growth.

About Flowbox

Flowbox is a UGC (user-generated content) platform that enables brands to generate, collect, moderate and distribute social content from customers, influencers, and creators, enhancing engagement and boosting revenue through the power of social proof. With over 1,000 global brand customers and a presence in 40+ countries, Flowbox is at the forefront of the UGC category. Headquartered in Stockholm, with major offices in Barcelona, Amsterdam, and Copenhagen, Flowbox helps customers around the world fuel growth and build stronger connections with their audiences.

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