Hypergrowth Security Company Saves $63 Million with Duckbill

From simple vendor to strategic partner

Most companies start using AWS in the context of a relatively straightforward vendor relationship—you use their services and pay the list price for the resources you use. But with a sustained 100% annual growth rate, this cybersecurity company correctly sensed an opportunity to negotiate a much more favorable deal with its upcoming contract renewal. While the leader tasked with the negotiation had navigated AWS contracts before, this was a different, multi-headed beast.

The new contract would establish a complex relationship with AWS spanning their two distinct roles:

• Customer: The traditional role, purchasing AWS services for internal operations, as they had been doing
• Partner: Selling their product through AWS Marketplace and co-selling with AWS sales teams 

With AWS being so integral to the client’s product, they knew they needed additional expertise to get the best possible deal. 

Bring in the experts

The client recognized the value of bringing in experts. “As a company, you’ll never get enough at-bats to see multiple negotiations. So you should bring somebody in who has gone through it dozens of times, all the various iterations, not to mention all the contacts within the AWS teams.”

A colleague who had previously worked with Duckbill at another company made a strong recommendation. “This guy said we just need to call Duckbill. To him, it was an absolute no-brainer. The cost-benefit is a slam dunk. I just knew it was going to be good, and we’re going to get all kinds of valuable insight.”

Deep dive analysis

For a company in a hypergrowth stage, predicting AWS usage three years out is difficult. Overcommit, and you’ll owe shortfall fees. Undercommit, and you’ll leave available discounts on the table. You have to accurately predict a moving target. 

Duckbill conducted an extensive usage analysis of all services. “Duckbill analyzed the hell out of it,” the client explained.  “We got all that analysis back as detailed spreadsheets where we could adjust all the variables.” With no stone left unturned, the analysis gave the client the confidence to move forward.

Multi-layered etrategy for maximum savings

Duckbill advised the client on a multi-layered negotiation approach to find all possible savings. The strategy employed both cross-service discounting along service-specific discounting with individual AWS high-usage services.   

As the client explained, “We had very high spend on some different services that we leveraged. That’s how it became so detailed—we negotiated each of those different things separately.”

Beyond the negotiated discounts, Duckbill identified additional credits and incentives tied to specific AWS programs like migrations and new service adoption, further reducing the overall bill on top of the discounts. “We wouldn’t have known about those without Duckbill,” the client said.

On the flip side, not every service warrants negotiation effort, and knowing where to focus saves everyone time and energy. “Duckbill could say, ‘Hey, we’ve done this before. It’s a waste of your time to negotiate on such and such component, because AWS won’t budge in this case.’ Okay, great. That just saved us 10 hours.”

The client team led the negotiations, with Duckbill providing strategic support. Rather than treating AWS as an adversary, Duckbill coached the team on partnership-oriented discussions that aligned goals and created win-win outcomes. When AWS manages your entire infrastructure, they’re essentially your partner. Collaborative approaches work far better than adversarial ones.

No money left on the table

The client’s choice to bring in Duckbill paid off. The engagement delivered $63M in effective discounts off the initial offer on their $300M contract, representing an improvement of 21%.

“The single biggest highlight was the confidence that we didn’t leave money on the table,” the client emphasized.

The value extended beyond immediate cost savings into strategic insights and opportunities the company wouldn’t have discovered otherwise. “Three or four little things Duckbill spotted easily paid for the cost of bringing in a third party. I can’t see us finding any of those smaller details if we were running the negotiation on our own,” he said.

Duckbill’s value was clear. “At no point were we talking about what Duckbill charged… it was so far in the rearview mirror. We could stay focused on the project and not on the negotiation price.”

“I would still call Duckbill”

When asked about recommending Duckbill, the client was unequivocal: “A hundred percent. Even now, having experienced an AWS negotiation, if you were to throw another few hundred million dollar deal in front of me, I would still call Duckbill,” he said.