Fathom's founders cut a $100,000 bill, then split the company

The workload

Fathom Analytics was run for years by two people, Jack Ellis and Paul Jarvis, who handled infrastructure and ownership decisions alike without outside staff. A 22 January 2024 post, self-reported and written by Ellis, describes a self-directed project to cut Amazon Web Services costs on the endpoint that handles billions of requests a month, going service by service, load balancer, Lambda, CloudWatch, NAT Gateway and others, because, in his words, we were overspending on AWS. A separate, later 2 December 2024 post, also self-reported, describes a different kind of workload: negotiating an internal ownership change after co-founder Paul Jarvis decided to retire, reaching agreement, Ellis says, within 24 hours of the conversation, then spending roughly a month with lawyers and accountants to finalize it.

What the documents show

Self-reported: the January 2024 post states the AWS optimization cut $100,000 a year from infrastructure spending, breaking out one line item, CloudWatch logging, at $7,550 a year in isolation. Self-reported: the December 2024 post states Fathom had run since 2019 with 100% ownership split between Paul and Jack Ellis and zero outside funding, and that as of 1 December 2024 Ellis took full control of the company while Jarvis exited to a part-time freelance design role. Neither post states current revenue or customer count; the December post says only that the company has grown every month since it started, a self-reported trend with no figure attached.

The operating cost

Self-reported: the stated infrastructure saving is $100,000 a year, achieved by removing services the company judged unnecessary rather than by negotiating a lower rate, as the January 2024 post describes it. No cited document states the price of the ownership transition itself; legal and accounting work is mentioned only as time spent, about a month, not as a dollar figure, so this entry does not estimate one. Estimated: a company that could absorb one founder's full buyout without raising outside capital, per the post's own framing, implies the business was already generating cash beyond its operating costs at the time of the transaction, an inference drawn from the transaction's structure as described, not a stated cash-flow number.

The stop condition

The January 2024 post's stated stop condition was budget-driven: the optimization work targeted only the ingest endpoint because that is where the money was being spent, and stopped once the major line items were addressed, not once every possible saving was exhausted. The December 2024 post's stop condition for the founder relationship was personal, not financial: Ellis states the arrangement changed when Paul was ready to retire, a condition neither post ties to a revenue or workload threshold.

• Was a stated infrastructure saving measured against a prior year's actual bill, or an estimate?
• Does an internal ownership buyout, structured without outside financing, change how a company prices its own product?
• What operating workload falls to a single remaining founder after a co-founder's exit?

Fathom's own posts document a specific cost cut and a specific ownership change, each dated and attributed by name. Neither post states a revenue figure, so this entry does not supply one.