15 Jun 2025 • Calgary, AB
Expensive enterprise software is dying, and I saved $70k per month by killing it. Here’s the thing: there are 9.8 million bank check images that Plains needs to retrieve accurately and with ease—that's 4.9 million checks front and back! Image Viewer (an app from a retail bank) is a legacy piece of software that lets companies find and view bank cheques. Unfortunately (or fortunately for me) it is being phased out and the replacement is charged on a per retrieval basis. The estimated cost of this new software, for Plains All American, is seventy thousand dollars a month! This is where I come in: I built an app that lets the treasury team do exactly this, from the data pipeline to the front end, and it costs only a few hundred dollars a month. My app entirely replaces Image Viewer, does the job quicker, and automates manual steps. I learned a ton building this and am absolutely certain there are countless opportunities like this across all businesses from big to small.
On the technical side, the app was built in Python Flask with a Html + Css + JS frontend, and the data pipeline involved multithreaded extraction of terabytes of images from thousands of zip files, parsing millions of entries from xml into a database, and setting that all to run incrementally so the information is always up to date. The app was deployed on the Databricks Apps platform, which I highly recommend checking out if your company runs Databricks at all.
#Python #Flask #Databricks #CostSavings