Software firm 37signals estimates that it saved $2 million on its cloud bill this year after its cloud repatriation project.
The company's CTO and co-owner, David Heinemeier Hansson (AKA, DHH), posted claims on LinkedIn that the company has thus far reduced its cloud bill from $3.2 million per year to $1.3 million.
The company announced it was migrating project management platform Basecamp and subscription-based email service Hey off of both Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud in October 2022, citing the massive cloud bill it was seeing as the motivator.
In February 2023, 37signals estimated that by repatriating from the cloud, it could save as much as $7 million in the next five years. By September 2023, the company said it had saved $1 million, but based on its 2024 savings, the $7 million would be an underestimate.
DHH claims that 37signals' savings are more than previous estimates because "we got away with putting all the new hardware into our existing data center racks and power limits."
The company said it spent around $700,000 on the new Dell hardware, which was "entirely recouped during 2023 while the long-term commitments slowly rolled off."
The remaining $1.3 million cloud bill is all from AWS S3, said DHH. 37signals had a four-year contract with AWS for that file storage which will expire next summer, at which point the company intends to migrate the remaining 10 petabytes of data stored there.
"When we move out next summer, we'll be moving to a dual-DC Pure Storage setup, with a combined 18 petabytes of capacity. This setup will cost about the same as a year's worth of AWS S3 for the initial hardware. This brings our total projected savings from the combined cloud exit to well over $10 million over five years! While getting faster computers and much more storage," said DHH.
While these savings seem dramatic, they don't take into account the costs of hardware refreshes, additional operations roles that have to be created as a result of bringing hardware back into 37signals' remit, and the cost of running data centers in general in terms of power, cooling, etc.
Another well-known cloud repatriator is DropBox, which in 2016 decided to move back to operating its own data centers.