Network Karate Service — right-sized after a vendor-forced SaaS migration.
The CRM vendor announced end-of-life for the local install and moved every customer to a subscription cloud product — hosted with a low-grade Maryland provider. Contract entry went from 30 seconds per record to 3–4 minutes. Multiply that by a daily queue, by staff labor rate, by a year. The real bill wasn't the new subscription. It was the hidden bandwidth-and-time tax nobody had scoped.
Lance was the guy in the seat — Business & Inventory Manager at the time, entering the contracts himself. He felt the throughput loss personally, diagnosed the math, and translated it into dollars the owners could see. The tradeoff he presented: upgrade bandwidth to right-size for the new cloud provider, or walk away from the SaaS and re-host the CRM on infrastructure the business controlled.
What this proves now: we don't just audit cloud bills from the outside. We've been the operator whose productivity got taxed by someone else's architecture decision. That's the empathy we bring to every cost-optimization engagement today.