How Personality Pool cut 60% of their cloud cost

"Personality Pool is a personality screening tool . We work with hospitality, retail, healthcare, and any industry where hiring frontline workers is the core of their business, and also making sure that these workers have the right personality fit for the role. So we use AI to analyze different personality traits, um, speech patterns, and basically just a way to give our clients a snapshot of a candidate that goes beyond a resume.

We run a cloud-based infrastructure that processes video and behavioral data at scale. Our biggest challenge was handling massive traffic spikes, when companies post new jobs, we'd see 10-20x normal traffic as candidates rush to apply. We were essentially paying for peak capacity 24/7 to handle spikes that only happened occasionally. The video processing workloads made this especially expensive since they're so compute-intensive."

When we first met, you complained that cloud costs quickly got out of hand and you expressed some concerns about how that scales as your business grows.

"I remember that. Honestly, it felt like we were flying blind. Our engineering team would provision resources conservatively - better safe than sorry - but we had no visibility into what we actually needed versus what we were paying for. I knew we were wasting money, but I couldn't quantify how much or where to start fixing it. The lack of transparency made it impossible to set realistic budgets or forecast costs as we scaled."

Walk us through your experience implementing DevZero. What was the setup process like?

"I was honestly skeptical about adding another tool to our stack, but the read-only approach made the decision easy - no risk to production workloads. Our DevOps lead had it installed in under a minute. Within hours, we had visibility we'd never had before: real-time utilization metrics, cost breakdowns by team and project, and specific recommendations for optimization."

What else surprised you in the process?

"Two things blew me away. First, seeing our actual utilization at 15% was shocking - we were literally throwing away 85% of what we were paying for. Second, the speed of results. We started applying DevZero's recommendations on day 5, and within 24 hours our daily spend dropped by 30%. By day 30, we hit 60% total savings. That's faster ROI than any other infrastructure investment we've made."

What is the impact of optimizing your cloud spend on the overall business?

"The financial impact is obvious - 60% cost reduction goes straight to our bottom line. But the operational impact might be even more valuable. Now I can confidently approve new product initiatives knowing our infrastructure costs will scale predictably. My engineering team spends time building features instead of guessing at resource requirements. And frankly, as CEO, having real-time cost visibility gives me one less thing to worry about at night."

How would you describe DevZero to another CEO or Engineering Leader considering it?

"It's the easiest business decision I've made as CEO. Zero implementation risk, immediate visibility, and massive cost savings with no performance impact. If you're running Kubernetes and not using DevZero, you're literally paying 2x what you need to for infrastructure. The ROI timeline alone makes it a no-brainer."

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