Rebuilding an accountant-client SaaS and cutting cloud cost 80%
A platform-enhancement engagement for an accountant-client communication SaaS. 130+ user stories shipped, architecture overhauled for security and scalability, and a Cloud Advisory review that produced an 80% reduction in cloud infrastructure cost.
- Geography
- Wayne, New Jersey, United States
- Stage
- Established SMB
- Team
- 1 senior + 1 mid full-stack engineer, 1 product designer, 1 product owner
The situation
ElephantCPA had a working MVP that streamlined the interaction between accountants and their clients. The platform was in production, but the next phase needed real depth: a substantially expanded feature set, an architecture that could carry more weight than the MVP was designed for, and a security posture that matched the financial data the product handles.
The brief was a platform enhancement, not a rewrite. The work spanned product, infrastructure, and security, with a parallel ask to take a hard look at the GCP cloud bill and find what was being over-provisioned.
What we built
The engagement was scoped as AI Product Engineering: fixed-scope platform enhancement, milestone-billed, with a senior full-stack engineer leading and a mid full-stack engineer carrying the feature work alongside a product designer and a product owner.
On the product side, the team shipped 130+ user stories covering every meaningful platform surface: account management, document handling, accountant-client messaging, scheduling, and reporting. Each story landed with paired design and engineering review.
On the infrastructure side, a Cloud Advisory review of the GCP setup surfaced significant over-provisioning. The recommendations, applied across compute and storage, reduced cloud spend by 80%. The architecture overhaul also tightened the cybersecurity posture and stabilized the system end-to-end.
Tech stack: React with TypeScript, Node.js, MySQL, GCP Cloud Run for compute, integrations with Stripe (billing), SendGrid (email), and Zoho (CRM). The component design was deliberately scalable so subsequent feature work would not require re-architecting.
Outcome
-
80% reduction in cloud infrastructure cost after a Cloud Advisory review of the GCP setup
-
130+ user stories shipped across the platform enhancement engagement
ElephantCPA came out of the engagement with a platform that was faster, more secure, and meaningfully cheaper to run. The 80% reduction in cloud infrastructure cost is the most concrete number on file. Christopher Massood, co-founder and CEO, has been on record on Clutch describing the engineering work as transparent and honest, with the team going to extra lengths to maintain a clean process. (The verbatim Clutch quote is published on /testimonials.)
"Leanware is transparent, and they’re very honest with the work that they do."
— Christopher Massood , Co-Founder & CEO , Elephant CPA · Wayne, New Jersey