Leaving the Cloud:
Cloud Computing Isn’t For Everyone

Cloud computing is basically renting computers, instead of owning and operating your own server hardware. From the start, companies that offer cloud services have promised simplicity and cost savings. Basecamp has had one foot in the cloud for well over a decade, and HEY has been running there exclusively since it was launched two years ago. We’ve run extensively in both Amazon’s cloud and Google’s cloud, but the savings promised in reduced complexity never materialized. So we’ve left.

The rough math goes like this: We spent $3.2m on cloud in 2022. The cost of rack space and new hardware is a total of $840,000 per year. Leaving the cloud will save us $7 million over five years. And at a time when so many companies are looking to cut expenses, saving millions through hosting expenses sounds like a better first move than the rounds of layoffs that keep coming.

We share all of the details on the technical, operational and business outcomes of how we exited from the cloud, in these other posts:

• Cloud exit pays off in performance too
• Cut cloud before payroll
• De-cloud and de-k8s — bringing our apps back home
• Don’t be fooled by serverless
• Five values guiding our cloud exit
• The hardware we need for our cloud exit has arrived
• Introducing MRSK
• The only thing worse than cloud pricing is the enterprisey alternatives
• Sovereign clouds
• We stand to save $7m over five years from our cloud exit
• Why we’re leaving the cloud