UNICORNE | WHITEPAPER
“ With thousands of updates each year, even seasoned teams can’ t keep up”
ÉRIC PINET, CEO, UNICORNE
KEY TAKEAWAY
Resource-level analysis of a development database can be game-changing. Unicorne found switching from hourly backups with 90-day retention to daily snapshots in development and more reasonable production policies saved one client $ 2,000 per month eliminates idle capacity costs for appropriate workloads, while database engine changes can have major impact.
“ Aurora Serverless often looks attractive but can cost up to seven times more than a dedicated RDS instance,” Éric describes.“ By switching back, one client saved 75 % – nearly $ 20,000 per year.”
Level 4: Strategic commitments( ongoing) Enterprise discount programmes provide tiered discounts for organisations spending more than $ 500,000 annually. FinOps culture embeds cost awareness into engineering through real-time dashboards, tagging for accountability and budget alerts that make costs visible to everyone.
Why resource-level analysis matters Most teams rely on AWS Cost Explorer to understand their spending. The tool shows service-level totals( RDS, S3, Lambda, CloudWatch), but these
114 November 2025