They paid Amazon $3.2 million a year. Then they left.

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One company paid Amazon 3.2 million dollars in a year. And that bill was already discounted. So they left the cloud.

2022. 37signals, makers of Basecamp and HEY. About 267,000 dollars a month. The biggest item? File storage. About 908,000 dollars, in S3. The other 2.3 million? Servers, databases, caches, search.

So what would it take to replace that 2.3 million? A Dell order. Around 600,000 dollars. Sounds huge, right? Here's the trick. Spread it over five years. 120,000 a year. Their eight leased racks already cost 720,000 a year. And had room.

Add it up. Roughly 840,000 a year. Versus 2.3 million. That was the plan on paper. But did it hold?

Summer 2023: seven apps move onto their own hardware. HEY included. October 2024: the bill is 1.3 million. Almost 2 million saved a year. The hardware cost about 700,000. It paid for itself within 2023. And the ops team? Same size.

That last 1.3 million? All S3, locked in until summer 2025. The plan: move nearly 10 petabytes onto their own storage too. Their own estimate: well over ten million saved over five years.

Renting is great for spiky or uncertain load. But large, steady load? Do the math before you decide.

Full breakdown in the lecture.