Cutting Thredx’s GCP Bill by 93%

Client: Sean Sinko, Founder at Thredx
Platform: Google Cloud Platform
Result: 93% lower monthly GCP costs

The Problem: A Bill That Wouldn’t Go Away

Thredx had already done what most founders would do first.

🔴 Environments were shut down
🔴 Traffic was low
🔴 Usage looked minimal

But the GCP bill kept showing up every month — and it wasn’t small for the company.

Money was still going out the door, even though nothing meaningful was running. It felt like a ghost bill: real charges, no obvious cause.

Getting Visibility (The First Real Step)

Before touching anything, we needed clarity.

The first move was enabling BigQuery Billing Export so we could see exactly where the money was going — service by service, resource by resource.

Once the data was visible, the problem became obvious.

What Was Actually Causing the Spend

Two main issues stood out immediately:

🟠 Unattached persistent disks
Several disks were still being billed even though the servers they belonged to had been shut down long ago.

🟠 Accumulated daily snapshots
Automated snapshots had been running quietly in the background for months. Over time, they grew into a major line item — roughly 20–30% of the total monthly cost.

Nothing was “wrong” from GCP’s point of view.
These resources were doing exactly what they were configured to do.

They just weren’t needed anymore.

Fixing It Without Breaking Anything

Cost savings don’t matter if you accidentally delete something important.

So we took a safety-first approach:

🟢 Created full machine images of every server to preserve the complete application state.
🟢 Redeployed from those images and had the founder personally verify that everything worked exactly as expected.
🟢 Only then removed the unused disks and redundant snapshots.

No guesswork. No risky deletes.

The Outcome

The very next billing cycle told the story.

Thredx’s monthly GCP spend dropped by 93%.

The infrastructure didn’t just get cheaper — it finally matched how the business was actually being used. That reclaimed runway went straight back into building the product instead of paying for idle resources.

From the Founder

“Usaamah Ahmed reduced my monthly GCP spend by 93%. An absolute game changer for my early-stage startup.

He didn’t just point out issues or give high-level advice. He went directly into our GCP environment, made the changes himself, and explained exactly what he was doing and why.

He took the time to understand our setup, our constraints, and our priorities. That mix of deep technical skill and a human approach is rare — and it’s why I’d work with him again without hesitation.”

— Sean Sinko, Founder at Thredx

Still Paying for Things You Shut Down?

If your GCP bill doesn’t line up with your actual usage, you’re probably paying for things like:

• orphaned disks
• old snapshots
• resources no one remembers creating

I offer a free 30-minute audit to find exactly where money is leaking.

If Thredx could cut 93%, there’s probably savings hiding in your account too.