The $36K/year tool we replaced with a weekend of AWS
Situation
The brand paid a third-party service over $36K a year to track shipments — and the tracking still lagged. Updates weren’t real-time, coverage across carriers was inconsistent, and customer service ate the difference: “where is my order?” tickets that a good tracking system would have prevented. The renewal was coming up. The default move was to renew, because that’s always the default move.
What I did
I priced the alternative first — that’s the step most teams skip. The core of the tool was carrier polling, event normalization, and status storage: a queue, some functions, and a database. I designed and built a replacement on AWS — SQS for event ingestion, Lambda for carrier polling and normalization, RDS for status history — integrated directly into our Shopify and NetSuite flows. Real-time updates across 3+ carriers, exposed to both the customer-facing site and internal dashboards.
Results
$36K+ in annual savings, better data than the tool we dropped, and delivery visibility that fed directly into a conversion win: showing customers reliable delivery estimates contributed to an 8% conversion lift in A/B tests. Infrastructure cost of the replacement: a rounding error. The system needed near-zero maintenance after launch.
The takeaway
Every SaaS renewal above $20K/year deserves one honest question: what does this actually do, and what would it cost to own? Sometimes the answer is “renew.” It wasn’t this time.
This is the kind of problem I find and price in a two-week store audit.