How We’re Helping Drive Efficiency & Reduce Spend

As we all navigate these uncertain times, one thing has never been more certain — the need to reduce spend. Dollars saved directly equates to employees kept, strategic investments continued, and savings passed on to customers. Finding unnecessary spend and inefficiencies across the business is more important than ever before.

Sean Knapp

sean@ascend.io

Pennies Saved

“A penny saved is a penny earned.” Words of wisdom — something my grandparents would be proud to hear me say. Ironically, I can’t recall a single instance of this saying in over 15 years of my career. That’s unfortunate. Perhaps we just need to modernize it:
“A penny saved is a penny invested” — invested in the longevity of our companies, our customers, and our employees.

As we navigate these uncertain times, one thing has never been more certain: the need to reduce spend. Every dollar saved means more employees retained, more strategic investments continued, and more savings passed on to customers. Identifying unnecessary spending and inefficiencies is more critical than ever.

Many of Ascend’s customers rely on us to keep their costs low by automating and optimizing their data pipelines and connected systems. We pride ourselves on features that make big data pipelines faster and more resource-efficient. From data and job deduplication that ensures work is never repeated, to incremental data processing and intelligent Spark parameter tuning — our platform is built for efficiency.

Over the past six months, we’ve heavily invested in optimizing our platform and, despite our growth, we’ve reduced our cloud spend by 70%. Many of these savings have already been passed on to our customers through our pricing — and we’re just getting started. Today, we’re rolling out several new initiatives.

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Efficiency: Doing More With Less

Ascend may already be one of the most efficient platforms for building and running data pipelines — but we’re not done improving. In the coming weeks, we’ll begin rolling out a series of performance optimizations across customer environments.

While results will vary based on your specific use case, our lab tests have shown up to a 2x increase in efficiency and up to a 50% cost reduction. Best of all, there’s nothing you need to do — these improvements will happen automatically. As they roll out, you’ll use fewer resources and pay us less (please don’t tell our investors).

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Flexibility: New Pricing Models

We’re introducing several changes to our pricing to better meet our customers' needs:

Zero Commit
In these uncertain times, long-term commitments based on unpredictable forecasts are hard to justify. Ascend is now available on a fully On-Demand / Pay-as-you-Go basis — no annual contract required.
Cluster Pricing
We’ve always offered a Serverless pricing model — pay only for the resources you use, by the second. While this works well for bursty workloads, it can be less cost-effective at scale. That’s why we’re introducing Cluster Pricing — ideal for systems with >20% average utilization. We’ll help you assess and convert your contract if this model is a better fit.
Transparent Pricing
Our pricing is based on Dataflow Units (DFUs), a unit of compute consumption. While portable and scalable, this can be confusing. We're simplifying this by translating DFU pricing to straightforward cents-per-vCPU-hour rates, for both Serverless and Cluster options.
Volume Discounts
We're also making our volume discounts public. Here's how it works:
Pre-purchase $25,000 of usage for a year and receive a 5% discount. Double that commitment and get another 5%. Not committing in exact $25,000 x 2ⁿ increments? No problem — here’s the formula:
what_you_pay = commit × 0.95^(1 + log₂(commit / 25000))

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BYO: Leverage What You’ve Got

Many teams have already made significant infrastructure investments they’re committed to using. That’s why we’re formalizing support for:

BYO Infra
Some of our customers already run in their own VPCs for security reasons, or to leverage enterprise-wide cloud spend commitments and discounts. We're helping these customers save even more by running predominantly on Spot and Preemptible VMs — delivering up to 90% cost savings.
BYO Spark
If you're a happy Databricks user but want to optimize cost, Ascend can help. Running all your pipelines on All Purpose Clusters is expensive. Ascend now brings advanced features — including autoscaling, cluster reuse, interactive queries, and more — to the more cost-effective Jobs Light Clusters, helping you stretch your Databricks credits further.

Extra Hands: Free Optimization & Migration Services

We know many teams are being asked to do twice the work with half the resources — upgrading systems, lowering maintenance and COGS, and still delivering on the roadmap. Sometimes, you just need an extra pair of hands. We’re offering free optimization and migration services to help customers quickly move off legacy systems and focus on the future.

Sharing the Knowledge

We’ve learned a lot about optimizing infrastructure and data pipelines. Much of what we’ve built is valuable to everyone — not just Ascend customers. That’s why we’re launching a video series hosted by our infrastructure team to share the tips & tricks we’ve learned from running 100+ Kubernetes clusters across 3 clouds over the past 4+ years.

If infra optimization isn’t your thing, odds are you know someone who’d benefit — we’d appreciate you helping us spread the word.

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Sponsorship

We may not be expert data scientists, but we’re strong data engineers. Our passion is delivering live, continuously updating data — across clouds, platforms, and tools — to the people who need it most. To support the fight against COVID-19, we’re providing free Ascend access to qualifying teams. We're currently sponsoring Lumiata’s Global AI Hackathon and eager to support other mission-driven efforts.
If you’re working on something impactful, reach out: data-eng@ascend.io

Looking Forward

The thing about big data is — it’s big. And right now, that spend needs to get a lot smaller. While we’re far from done, I’m incredibly proud of the work we’re doing to help customers reduce costs and make every dollar count.

Warm regards,
Sean Knapp
Founder & CEO, Ascend.io