Ask HN: Any recent small optimizations which saved you or your company money?

My company was using a service to optimize/compress our imagery using their WordPress Plugin for ~$40/mo.

We were looking into switching to Cloudinary which seemed to have better compression results without losing additional quality, but using their offering (transformations + CDN + storage) would have increased our costs to ~$250/mo.

After giving it some thought, I ended up forking the WordPress plugin we were using and replacing the service it used with Cloudinary to compress and replace our existing assets on our server (cutting out the CDN + storage portion).

In the end, the new system gives us better results and we should fall within Cloudinary's free tier and now spend less each month than before.

Does anyone else have some optimizations they've made in the interest of cost savings?

3 comments

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mtmail 5y ago ↗

We switched our encrypted compress offsite data backups to use https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/ Borg Backup does data deduplication so the required disk space is much lower.

We saved 50% cost immediately. Then found out https://rsync.net/products/attic.html has special plans (compare to https://www.rsync.net/pricing.html) for Borg users and saved another 30%. Not bad for an afternoon of work.

rikroots 5y ago ↗

Last month I put aside an hour of my time to go through all the direct debits I have registered on my current account.

It's amazing just how many of them I've collected over the years - in particular online newspaper subscriptions. Individually they cost £peanuts/month, but together they were costing me far more than I expected - or noticed on my statements. Most were for things I no longer use (in particular, service subs for personal projects) or read.

All in all, a very profitable hour of my time!

stevesearer 5y ago ↗

I did something similar a couple of years ago and found in the process that instead of paying $50/mo for the full Adobe Creative Cloud I could switch to a $10/mo photographers plan which included only Photoshop and Lightroom. Those are the only two programs I use so not was a nice savings.