Rapid Scaling on Cloud Leads to a Need to Manage Costs

Daily.co is a provider of real-time video, voice, and AI services. As a SaaS platform, Daily enables developers to build voice agents, multimodal AI apps, and live audio/video experiences into their applications. All of Daily’s infrastructure runs entirely in the cloud, with the majority of workloads in AWS. Given the always-on, real-time nature of their services, compute is one of their most significant spends.

With rapid growth — driven by key enterprise wins, plus the rapid growth of Pipecat, the most widely used orchestration framework for developers building voice agents and multimodal AI —Daily prioritized controlling cloud spend. However, long-term savings options such as AWS Reserved Instances and Savings Plans required forecasting accuracy and financial risk tolerance that a small, lean team couldn’t justify. Daily needed a flexible way to unlock savings without overcommitting.

1. Unpredictable usage made long-term commitments risky: Daily’s infrastructure team had explored using reserved instances and compute savings plans in the past, but forecasting needs was time-intensive and risky. Unused commitments led to money down the drain. ‍
2. No dedicated FinOps team: With an engineering-first organization, cloud cost management fell to engineers and co-founders, who preferred to prioritize product
3. Scaling costs threatened margins: After key enterprise wins, Daily knew their AWS costs would scale rapidly — unless they could capture better discounts without sacrificing flexibility.

Flexible Commitments Unlock Confidence and Control

Daily's AWS team referred them to Archera during discussions on maximizing their savings. Archera platform and flexible commitments allowed Daily to:

1. Adopt flexible, short-term commitments: With Archera, Daily captures savings with smaller, incremental commitments — without being locked into rigid multi-year terms.
   
2. Iterate quickly with monthly reviews: Archera’s cadence of monthly success check-ins give Daily the confidence to experiment, knowing commitments can be adjusted

“It’s removed a lot of the downsides that we perceived of committing to resource usage and spend with Amazon.” — Brian, Cloud Infrastructure, Daily

Sustained Growth with Lower Costs and More Flexibility

With Archera, Daily has minimized cloud cost growth while scaling their AWS footprint. Flexible commitments and monthly reviews give the team confidence to scale infrastructure without financial risk, while freeing engineers to focus on product innovation instead of cost forecasting.

1. Significant cost savings during rapid growth: Daily has been able to sustain major expansion of its AWS footprint while minimizing associated costs, saving over $250K 
2. Time savings for engineers: With Archera handling the complexity of commitments, engineers spend less time worrying about cloud cost implications of new projects and more time building.
   
3. Increased flexibility: The ability to resell commitments and make incremental adjustments each month reduced risk and unlocked agility.
   
4. Confidence to scale infrastructure: Daily can test new configurations and expand clusters knowing they can layer on flexible commitments without long-term lock-in.
   
   

“Day to day, I spend less time considering whether something I want to build is financially sound. I just feel a lot more flexibility.” — Matt, Cloud Infrastructure, Daily

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