Efficiency & technology consulting
Most businesses pay for inefficiency. We find it and fix it.
Garnmile takes a hard look at where your money and time actually go — subscriptions, infrastructure, the way work gets done — then cuts what is wasted and improves what is left. Software you can own is one of the paths. It is rarely the only one.
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31 unused seats across four toolsRecurring costs$1,240/mo found
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CMS on oversized cloud hostingInfrastructure$5,400/mo found
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Invoices matched by handProcess9 hrs/wk found
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Monthly report rebuilt manuallyWorkflow6 hrs/wk found
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Two vendors doing one jobRecurring costs$610/mo found
Illustrative findings, rounded figures. Yours come out of the review.
The problem
Inefficiency compounds quietly, because nobody owns it.
Every cost and every habit was reasonable the day it started. Nobody re-checks. Five years on, the business is paying — in money and in hours — for decisions no one remembers making.
Subscriptions outlive their reason
Every tool was justified the day it was signed. Nobody re-checks, so the stack keeps growing after the need stops.
Infrastructure sized for a day that never came
Cloud bills are set by the peak someone imagined, then never revisited. You pay for headroom you have never used.
Processes calcify around old tools
The manual step everyone works around costs more than the tool it works around. It just never shows up on an invoice.
Nobody can name the total
Money and time leak across cards, departments and habits. The first number we produce is usually the first anyone has seen.
What we do
Measure, fix and maintain — as one engagement.
Measure
We inventory everything recurring — subscriptions, infrastructure, and the manual work wrapped around them — and rank it by what it costs in money and in hours, and what it would take to fix.
Fix
One change at a time, easiest first. Migrate a service onto software you own, right-size the hosting, redesign the handoff, build the small tool that should have existed. Parallel-run, then cut over.
Maintain
What we fix stays fixed. Updates, backups, monitoring and a quarterly look at what to retire next are ours. You keep the credentials; you never keep the pager.
The paths we take
Most engagements use two or threeRecurring costs
Subscriptions, seats, overlapping vendors, renewal creep.
Infrastructure
Cloud bills, hosting, storage and egress. Often: your own hardware.
Software you own
Self-hosted open source in place of rented SaaS. Migrated and maintained.
Workflows & process
Manual handoffs, reports by hand, approval chains. Redesigned or automated.
Something else costing you? Bespoke consulting for the rest — scoped as its own engagement, priced up front.
Talk it throughOne path · Software you own
Self-hosted open source is not the compromise. It is usually the better system.
The assumption is that a vendor is more reliable than something you run yourself. Once it is set up properly and someone is accountable for it, the opposite holds.
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Reliability you control
When a vendor has an outage you refresh a status page. When your own service has one, we already have the alert, the backup and the runbook.
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Customisable to the actual workflow
You are not filing a feature request into a queue and hoping. If it matters enough, we build it.
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Predictable, flat costs
Compute is cheap and does not care how many seats you add. Growth stops scaling against you.
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No lock-in — including ours
Open formats, your infrastructure, documented well enough for anyone to take over. Leaving is a Tuesday, not a project.
We migrate onto: Nextcloud · Gitea · Mattermost · Grafana · Plausible · PostgreSQL · Vaultwarden · Paperless-ngx · Uptime Kuma · Outline · n8n · Metabase
Case study · Infrastructure path
Client confidential$6,000 a month became $600.
A client was paying AWS six thousand dollars a month to serve their CMS and its media. We moved it onto hardware they own — their own drives, their own box — and kept the same transfer speeds. The bill dropped by ninety percent. Nothing got slower.
One thousand dollars of equipment they own outright replaced six thousand a month of rented capacity.
We can't name them. The numbers are theirs, and they are exact.
Toggle it. Or wait — it flips on its own.
What the switch cost
One-time, paid onceTheir equipment, bought once. Theirs to customise, upgrade or repurpose — and it never renews.
AWS charges to get their own data out — about one extra month of the old bill.
Start to finish. Only the egress was money spent; the rest they still own.
At $5,400 saved every month, the whole switch paid for itself inside six weeks — egress included. Year one came out roughly $57,800 ahead; every year after that is the full $64,800. And the hardware is still theirs.
One engagement's result, not a promise. Your actual number comes out of the review.
Straight answers
The questions, answered properly.
Is this only about software?
No. Software you rent is one of the paths, and often the easiest to prove. We look at infrastructure, hosting, workflows and manual process with the same method — measure it, fix the easy reversible things first, keep it fixed. The review tells you which path pays back fastest.
Isn't self-hosting less reliable?
Unmanaged, yes — an unpatched box nobody owns is worse than any vendor. Managed, no. You get monitoring, tested restores and an agreed recovery time, which is more than a status page and a credit note gives you. The difference is not SaaS versus self-hosted; it is whether somebody is accountable.
What happens if you disappear?
Everything runs on infrastructure in your name, with credentials you hold, using well-known open-source software and written runbooks. We build the handover on day one. Moving to another firm or in-house is a handover, not a rescue.
We don't have anyone technical to run it.
That is what the maintenance retainer is for. Your team uses the software; nobody on your side needs to administer it. If you later hire someone, we train them.
Is it really cheaper once you include your fees?
That is the correct question, and the review answers it before you commit to anything: fees, hosting and migration effort against current spend, with a payback period. If a service should stay where it is, we say so and you keep the report.
Will it do everything our current tool does?
Sometimes not on day one — and where that is true we say it in the plan, not after the migration. In exchange you can change it. Gaps that matter get built; features nobody used get dropped.
Start here
Start with the number nobody has.
An efficiency review is fixed-scope: a full picture of where your money and hours go, with a ranked list of what to fix and what it saves. You own the document either way.