big SaaS cut $300K in QA costs and quadrupled automation

Tl;dr

A rapidly scaling B2B SaaS company was stuck in a costly and slow testing cycle, spending more than $300,000 annually on a vendor-locked provider while struggling to keep pace with twice-weekly releases. Their QA process was a bottleneck - test automation couldn’t keep up and test maintenance dragged. Octomind’s AI-powered QA automation platform helped the company quadruple its automation throughput, cut execution times from days to hours, and gain full ownership of their test suite.

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8,000 tests, 6,000 still manual

The company’s product was evolving faster than their testing process could match. Twice-weekly releases demanded precision and speed, yet every cycle began with a rush of manual checks and mounting pressure. Out of 8,000 functional end-to-end tests, only 2,000 were automated. The rest relied on testers spread across three continents, following a costly and complex follow-the-sun model that was difficult to coordinate.

To bridge the gap, they brought in a Testing-as-a-Service (TaaS) provider. Instead of accelerating things, it slowed them down. The provider’s setup existed outside their normal workflows, broken tests took up to 48 hours to fix. Worst of all - they didn’t own the code for the automated tests.

The bottleneck looked like this:

• 8,000 functional tests, out of which were 6,000 still manual
• Heavy reliance on global manual teams to meet coverage goals
• Twice-weekly releases frequently delayed by slow test fixes
• A locked-in relationship with a vendor who controlled the test code
  
  

James, Senior QA Engineer, recalls the frustration:

“Every time a test failed, we’d lose momentum. Two days to fix a broken case might not sound like much, but when you release twice a week, it’s crippling.”

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Evaluating new test automation providers 

The QA leadership team knew they couldn’t keep pace with product growth under the current model. They ran a proof-of-concept with several automation providers, looking for one that could deliver speed, control, and ease of use.

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Octomind stood out for its combination of AI-powered test creation, Playwright-based code that the customer fully owns, and deep integration into existing workflows.

Once chosen, the rollout was almost immediate. Octomind was connected to GitHub Actions within minutes, allowing the team to run automated tests across development, staging, and production environments from day one. Sharding by tags enabled hundreds of tests to execute in parallel, turning what used to be a multi-day process into a task that now completes in hours.

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Automation made by non-coders

Onboarding was fast and intuitive. Even junior manual testers were creating repeatable automated cases in a short time thanks to Octomind’s natural language interface and visual editor. Non-technical team members were able to define, refine, and run tests without touching code. When prompting wasn’t enough to fully capture a scenario, the advanced recorder served as a backup - letting testers walk through a flow step-by-step and turn it into an automated test case instantly. 

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“Before, automation felt like a specialist’s job. Now, anyone on the team can add value directly. That’s changed the way we work together.”
James, Senior QA Engineer

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Octomind also introduced prompt optimization creating a standardized prompt format from each tester’s initial inputs and asking clarifying questions to ensure complete coverage. This not only improved test quality but also made cases easy to understand when reviewing work created by others.

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Keeping pace through AI maintenance

With a constantly evolving product, test breakages are inevitable. In the past, each one meant delays, frustration, and long ticket threads with the TaaS provider. 

Octomind’s AI-driven maintenance changed that dynamic, detecting flaky tests, proposing fixes, and letting the QA team approve them with minimal effort. Instead of spending hours diagnosing failures, they now spend minutes confirming the solution.

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The measurable impact

• Automation throughput rose from 120 new test cases a month to 120 each week
  
• Execution time fell from multiple days to just a few hours
  
• Capacity worth roughly $300,000 per year was freed up by halving the time seven US-based SDETs spent diagnosing and fixing failing tests, and enabling thirty manual QAs across three continents to focus their regained hours on creating automated test cases instead of running repetitive manual checks.
• Release confidence improved significantly, with fewer delays and higher stability in production.

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Next step: Automation at the source

With Octomind now embedded in their daily workflows, the team is moving toward generating tests at earlier stages of product development. This means integrating Octomind directly into their pull request and merge request processes, so that every change ships with its own automated validation before it reaches staging.

Although early in its rollout, initial experiments have been promising. Tests created in this way are more contextual, faster to validate, and immediately ready to run as part of the CI process. 

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Michael sees this as a natural evolution:

"By building tests alongside the code, QA becomes a proactive guardrail. That’s how you reach super high coverage without slowing anything down"