How Pump saved 1,600+ engineering hours with custom ops software
“Retool has been like a time machine for our engineering team. It’s saved us thousands of hours and empowered us to ship new products at a pace we never could have achieved otherwise.”
—Stuart Lundberg, Head of Operations, Pump
Company overview
Industry: Cloud optimization and FinOps
Regions: Global (serving 1,500+ customers)
Retool capabilities used: Apps
Use cases: Billing automation, customer onboarding, cloud operations, savings execution, account management
Pump helps companies optimize their cloud infrastructure across AWS, GCP, and Azure. By automating cloud cost savings, improving security, and enhancing visibility, Pump enables engineering and finance teams to reduce spending and strengthen their cloud operations.
Managing well over $20 million in cloud spend monthly, Pump needed tooling that would allow them to scale rapidly without overwhelming their engineering team. Manual processes created bottlenecks that limited how quickly they could deliver savings to customers. Retool removed these constraints, allowing Pump to grow its customer base 30x in less than two years.
“Retool removed critical bottlenecks by allowing us to consolidate workflows and metrics into a single, reliable interface. It freed up engineering time, improved speed and accuracy, and allowed us to scale our impact far more efficiently.”
—Stuart Lundberg, Head of Operations, Pump
Engineering bottlenecks threatened growth and product velocity
Before Retool, Pump’s critical workflows required engineers to work directly in the database or AWS console. This created two major bottlenecks: high risk of human error and heavy dependency on engineering for operational tasks that shouldn’t have required engineering expertise.
As a result, only engineers could perform actions like purchasing Reserved Instances or Savings Plans—core functions of Pump’s product that directly deliver savings to customers. This limited how quickly the team could boost impact.
Stuart Lundberg, Pump’s Head of Operations who joined as an early non-technical hire, recalls the pain: “There was one Slack channel with maybe 10 or 15 separate requests. They’re all things that now just take a button press in Retool, but back then each one would take an engineer 45 minutes to an hour.”
Scaling operations within a governed system
Retool’s enterprise AppGen platform allowed Stuart and the Pump team to consolidate critical workflows into a single interface powered by their own APIs, enabling non-technical team members to execute complex workflows without waiting for engineering support.
With five active builders and 50+ daily users across the organization, Pump used Retool to build an operational backbone with four core apps:
- Human-in-the-Loop dashboard: one of Pump’s core products uses Retool where sometimes team members generate and execute cost-saving recommendations for customers. Initially, only engineers could do this work. Now, Pump’s Technical Operations team uses Retool to execute recommendations with proper risk scoring and guardrails. This saves customers tens of millions of dollars yearly.
- Collections dashboard: the central billing hub where the team manages invoices, tracks payments, and monitors accounts receivable. The team has regenerated over 2,800 invoices in seconds, instead of what would have taken minutes of manual engineering work per invoice.
- AWS, GCP, and Azure Command Centers: sales enablement dashboards that empower the sales team to onboard customers seamlessly and manage the pre-sales process without engineering support.
- SQILM (Search Query Instance Liquidity Machine): a proprietary tool that allows Pump to search for Reserved Instances across their customer network and identify opportunities to resell instances from one customer to another—like subletting an AWS lease.
With these apps, Pump has saved over 1,600 hours of engineering time and redirected those hours towards building new products and features. With engineering time freed up, Pump has accelerated product velocity. The company has shipped four major product releases since Stuart joined, going beyond its original cloud cost-cutting service.
“We’ve been able to have such faster product velocity since we leaned on Retool. We’ve built an all-out visibility product (Pump View), a security product (Pump Secure), we’re building a Kubernetes product, we’ve just been able to optimize all parts of cloud thanks to that time,” Stuart says.
Ops teams execute, engineers build product
Now, Pump’s engineers are freed up to build the platform and product features, and their operations teams use the internal platform to run the business while Retool handles repetitive work.
When asked how Pump would operate without Retool, Stuart is direct: “Without access to Retool, we’d not be able to be efficient with our time. We’d need to bring back more engineers on our team. We wouldn’t be able to ship as quickly for our new products or features.”
Today, almost everyone at Pump uses Retool across sales, engineering, finance, customer success, and operations. As the team builds new AI-powered products, Retool remains central to their ability to scale the business without scaling overhead costs.
“Retool is a core part of our tech stack, and it cannot be understated how amazing it has been to help us save our engineering time,” Stuart says.
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