Published
- 6 min read
How can small teams handle cloud like big companies?
For small teams and early-stage startups, cloud infrastructure can feel like both a superpower and a trap. On one hand, it offers you everything you need to move fast, compute on demand, scalability, and global access.
On the other hand, it drains your budget quickly, often without warning.
Cloud spend becomes the second-highest cost after salaries for most tech startups within their first year. It’s not because engineers are careless; it’s because the cloud is deceptively complex.
Big tech companies don’t have this problem.
They have cloud architects, DevOps teams, and dedicated FinOps analysts optimising every cent.
But what about startups? Shouldn’t lean teams have access to the same level of control and cost efficiency, without the headcount?
Kuberns was built on that very premise: to help small teams deploy like engineers but spend like CFOs.
With Kuberns, small teams can now spend smarter, scale better, and deploy faster with 60% less cloud cost on average.
Why do startups overspend on the cloud?
When you’re building your product, every hour counts. Startups often optimise for speed to market rather than cost efficiency, and rightfully so.
But this usually leads to:
- Over-provisioned resources
- Idle environments running for days
- Non-optimised instance types
- Reliance on vendor-specific abstractions
Stats to Support:
- 75% of startups overspend by at least 35% on cloud in their first 2 years (Gartner 2024)
- Unused or idle cloud resources account for 44% of total spend (Flexera State of Cloud Report, 2023)
- Most startups don’t start cost-optimising until Series A funding, by which point, inefficiencies are baked in.
That’s not just wasted money, it’s runway lost.
And here’s the kicker: even if you realise the waste, you likely don’t have the time (or team) to fix it.
That’s why many startups end up looking for automated solutions to reduce costs without changing code or setups.
Big companies don’t make these mistakes because they have:
- AI-driven autoscaling
- Reserved instance strategies
- Observability + cost alerts
- Teams dedicated to tuning every cost component
With Kuberns, you get all of the above, automated.
The rise of cloud cost tools
Over the last few years, a new wave of tools has emerged that promise to help startups reduce their cloud bills by giving refunds, recommending rightsizing, or buying reserved instances on your behalf.
These tools are useful, but they’re reactive.
They don’t deploy your app. They don’t optimise your infrastructure in real-time. They only tell you after the damage is done or offer partial refunds on mistakes that could have been avoided entirely.
Startups using these platforms often find that:
- They still need engineering effort to act on recommendations
- They have to give away cloud access or billing credentials
- They’re not solving the root cause, over-provisioning and under-utilisation
This is where Kuberns flips the model. Instead of analysing waste after it happens, we prevent it using AI.
Kuberns: AI-Powered Deployment that saves you money from day One
Kuberns isn’t a plugin or a cost-monitoring dashboard. It’s a full-fledged AI-powered deployment engine that manages your apps end-to-end from launch to scale.
If you’re a startup building on AWS, chances are you’ve had that moment where your cloud bill made your jaw drop.
You didn’t do anything wrong; it’s just that AWS, while powerful, was never built with lean teams in mind.
It assumes you have DevOps engineers who know exactly how to tune instances, scale services, and shut things down when they’re not in use. Most early teams don’t have that luxury, and that’s where the overspending starts.
Kuberns was built to fix this.
Think of it as a layer on top of AWS that does all the smart optimisation for you, automatically. You still get the same AWS infrastructure (nothing changes under the hood), but Kuberns helps you use it smarter.
Instead of relying on humans to optimise infrastructure, Kuberns uses AI to:
- Choose the best-fit compute instances based on your app’s usage profile
- Set autoscaling thresholds so you only pay when traffic spikes
- Automatically shut down idle environments like staging or test
- Switch between On-Demand and Spot instances depending on workloads
- Detect and prevent memory leaks or infinite loops that can drain compute
And still Kuberns gives you complete control over every stage.
For most startups using us, that’s meant upto 40% reduction in their monthly AWS bill without changing their tech stack or workflows.
No switching clouds. No credits or refunds. Just real, ongoing savings because everything is deployed with cost-efficiency built in.
You still own your AWS account. We don’t lock you in or hide anything behind a black box. You get full transparency and control, while we take care of the complexity.
Why do startups need a proactive cloud cost layer?
Startups need solutions that reduce ongoing costs, not just give back past waste.
Here’s why:
Velocity trumps vigilance:
You’re shipping features, not checking cost graphs every day. You need infrastructure that’s smart enough to manage itself.
AI apps, microservices, and staging environments are cost traps:
It’s common to have 10+ small services running across environments, and even one forgotten pod can drain hundreds of dollars monthly.
You’re burning runway:
Even $1000 saved monthly equals $12,000 annually, that’s a hire, a campaign, or 6 extra months of product development.
You shouldn’t have to choose between speed and savings:
Most cost-saving tools force you to either switch platforms or delay development to “optimise.” Kuberns integrates directly with your workflow, so you don’t lose momentum.
Big results without big bills
Cloud used to be a competitive advantage. Then it became a cost centre.
With Kuberns, it becomes your scaling edge again.
✅ Deploy on AWS without DevOps
✅ Pay 40% less with AI-powered scaling
✅ Monitor, optimise, and forecast spend in real time
✅ All without adding headcount or stress
“The best way to beat big tech isn’t to outspend them. It’s to out-automate them.”
Deploy Smart, Scale Lean
The fastest-growing startups don’t treat cloud optimisation as a last-minute fix. They engineer it into their DNA.
The best way to control cloud costs is to never let them spiral in the first place. Kuberns automates that discipline by design.
With the rise of AI infrastructure, usage-based pricing, and multi-cloud deployments, the old way of managing cloud bills doesn’t cut it anymore. You need intelligence, not just insights.
Kuberns was built for the kind of teams that care about growth and runway. If you’re deploying multiple services, building AI-powered apps, or managing staging environments, it’s a necessity.
Instead of firefighting costs, let AI make your cloud stack lean by default.
Start spending smart, not hard.