The Case for Leaving

The Cloud Was Supposed to Be Cheaper. It Wasn't.

37signals saved $10M+ over five years by leaving AWS. Here's why more companies are following.

Cost Reality

The Cloud Tax

  • Cloud providers mark up compute 3–5x over bare-metal equivalent hardware
  • Managed database services charge 5–10x what the same software costs to run yourself
  • Egress fees of $0.08–0.12/GB penalize your own users for accessing your data
  • "Savings plans" and "reserved instances" are discounts off an already inflated price
  • Cloud credits are a hook — they create dependency on proprietary services
Cloud vs bare-metal cost comparison

What $500/month buys you

SpecCloud (AWS/GCP)Bare-Metal (Dedicated)
Servers2× e2-standard-8 VMs8× AX42 dedicated servers
CPU16 vCPUs (shared, burstable)48 dedicated cores (96 threads)
RAM64 GB512 GB ECC
Storage500 GB SSD (pd-ssd, extra cost)30 TB NVMe RAID-1
IOPS3,000 baseline per volume (pay for more)500,000+ per server (4M+ combined)
NetworkEgress metered ($0.09/GB)Unlimited (1 Gbps per server)
TenancyShared (noisy neighbors)Dedicated (yours alone)

The 37signals Numbers (DHH, 2023–2024):

Cloud spend: $3.2M/year → After exit: $1.3M/year (S3 only, now $0)

Hardware investment: $700K → Paid off in 6 months from savings

Projected savings: $10M+ over five years

Team size change: Zero. Same ops team. Same tooling. Better performance.

— David Heinemeier Hansson, 37signals / Basecamp / HEY
Performance

Dedicated Hardware. No Compromise.

MetricCloud (Typical)Bare-MetalAdvantage
Storage IOPS3K–16K (provisioned, extra cost)500,000+ (NVMe, included)30–150x
RAM AvailableExpensive to add ($/GB/mo)128–256 GB standard4–8x at same cost
CPUShared vCPUs, burstableDedicated cores, full clockConsistent, no throttling
Network Egress$0.08–0.12 per GBUnlimited included$0 per GB
Disk LatencyNetwork-attached (EBS/PD)Local NVMe (direct)10–50x lower

Cloud vs Bare-Metal — Same $500/month Budget

Cloud = 100% baseline. Bare-metal shown as percentage improvement for the same spend.

Control

Own Your Stack. All of It.

No Lock-In

  • Every component is open source — no proprietary services
  • No surprise pricing changes or service deprecations
  • No egress fees when you want to move your own data
  • Full root access — tune, optimize, and configure anything
  • Infrastructure as code (Ansible) — reproducible anywhere

Data Sovereignty

  • Choose your datacenter: country, city, even the rack
  • No cloud provider subject to foreign government data access
  • Physical control over hardware and data destruction
  • GDPR-friendly — your data in your chosen jurisdiction

The Licensing Truth

Cloud ServiceOur ReplacementLicense Cost
Amazon RDS / Cloud SQLPostgreSQL (Patroni HA)$0 — Free
MongoDB Atlas / DocumentDBPercona Server for MongoDB$0 — Free
Amazon MQ / CloudAMQPRabbitMQ$0 — Free
CloudWatch / DatadogPrometheus + Grafana + Loki$0 — Free
EKS / GKE / AKSK3s (CNCF-certified Kubernetes)$0 — Free
ALB / NLB / Cloud LBHAProxy + Keepalived$0 — Free

"Moore's Law makes hardware cheaper every year. Cloud pricing barely moves." — DHH

Fit Check

Is a Cloud Exit Right for You?

✓ Exit If...

  • Spending $20K+/month on cloud infrastructure
  • Workloads are predictable (not extreme burst patterns)
  • Running standard open-source databases and services
  • Growth means your cloud bill grows proportionally
  • You want better performance at lower cost

✗ Stay If...

  • Pre-product startup burning cloud credits
  • Extreme burst patterns (10x baseline for short windows)
  • Spending under $5K/month (savings don't justify effort)
  • Deeply dependent on proprietary services (Lambda, DynamoDB Streams)
  • Company may not survive 24 months

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