“The one differentiator that I’ve felt from Archera versus other products is transparency in the pricing aspect: There’s one fee that Archera takes off the top [for Insured Commitment premiums], and that’s pretty much it. That is not what I’ve experienced from demos that I’ve seen from others.”

— Kim Leung

Engineering Lead, Infrastructure

Hex

Customer story: Hex scales commitment coverage from zero to 98% on AWS with Archera’s flexible discounts

Fast-growing AWS infrastructure supporting AI-powered data collaboration solutions requires ongoing rate optimization

Hex empowers their customers to understand and leverage complex data effectively with Gen AI-driven collaboration running on a large, fast-scaling AWS architecture spanning EC2, RDS, ElastiCache, and OpenSearch.

Delivering cost-effective innovation and optimal customer experience requires Hex’s collaborating Infrastructure and Finance teams to:

Maximize AWS discounts while avoiding long-term commitment lock-in: Rapid deployment of evolving infrastructure choices demands flexible Reserved Instances and Savings Plans terms outside AWS’ native one and three-year commitment options. Prior to working with Archera, Hex was purchasing all AWS infrastructure On Demand.
Automate AWS cost management: Cost optimization and commitment management must occur autonomously without significant manual oversight.
Prioritize pricing and operational transparency: Hex sought a provider that offered clear pricing structures and reliable, customizable, and auditable commitment recommendations.

“Our infrastructure is constantly growing — there’s new nodes that are coming up pretty often in order to support our customers. We have Archera there in order to help make those more cost-effective decisions, and it makes it a little bit easier for us to not think as heavily about planning specific projects in order to make things more efficient — things like that — so, we’re kind of always prioritizing those cost initiatives, and Archera is along the way for that ride.”

— Kim Leung, Engineering Lead, Infrastructure, Hex

Why Hex trusts Archera for AWS commitment management

Hex requires a cloud rate management platform that offers both immediate AWS savings and long-term financial planning and commitment purchasing. Archera’s free platform offers:

Rapid setup and low-oversight: Archera’s platform deploys and operates with minimal configuration or ongoing effort, allowing customers to realize savings immediately and continuously without extensive ongoing review.
Flexible-term Insured Commitments: Archera’s 30-day Guaranteed Reserved Instances (GRIs) and three-year discounts with a one-year commitment enabling customers to optimize costs while maintaining the agility to scale and evolve infrastructure as needed.
Transparent commitment governance: Archera’s cost visibility tools provide clear insights into utilization and coverage metrics, enabling better decision-making.

“Full transparency: there have been other vendors that have reached out to me before, and there have been others that have given demos and things like that, and ultimately, at the end of the day, I never moved off of Archera because I think there are a lot of things about Archera that gives us the wins that we need and the savings that we are looking for with very little effort on our part. We implement Archera and then, from there, [Archera] is running in the background in order to get us those savings — those things are very, very valuable.”
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— Kim Leung, Engineering Lead, Infrastructure, Hex

Significant cloud savings and ongoing commitment lifecycle management with Archera

Archera enables Hex to significantly reduce AWS costs with native and flexible commitment options and streamlines the time required to manage and maximize cloud commitments. Key results include:

Immediate AWS savings: Hex employs Archera’s GSP and GRI Insured Commitments and commitment automation to achieve substantial cost reductions while avoiding long-term lock-in and operational overhead. Using Archera to manage commitments purchasing, Hex has scaled discount coverage from zero to 98% by utilizing a combination of native and Archera’s flexible-term commitments
Simplified commitment management: With Archera handling Reserved Instances and Savings Plan purchases and generating long-term scenario models, Hex’s team spends less time on AWS discount management and cloud cost forecasting.
Improved cloud financial planning: Archera’s transparent pricing model and real-time insights into utilization and coverage metrics enable Hex to make more strategic and holistic data-driven decisions about cloud spend.

“Time is one of the most valuable things that we gain from Archera. The Archera product is a bit of an anomaly in my day-to-day work. I may only log into the Archera product once a month because I can trust that Archera is doing what it needs to do under the hood, and I only need to check on it to make sure that it is still working the way I expect. Archera is saving our team time in managing, and trying to calculate, and trying to forecast, ‘what are all the exact dates we will need certain databases or certain compute for?’ So, that’s the other aspect of [Archera] that I haven’t yet found from anything else in the market.”
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— Kim Leung, Engineering Lead, Infrastructure, Hex

Hex’s ongoing collaboration with Archera underscores the importance of trust, transparency, and automation in modern cloud cost management — empowering Hex to focus on AWS agility and scale while controlling and governing cloud expenses and commitments without significant ongoing time investment.