In October 2022, David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH), CTO of 37signals, the company behind Basecamp and HEY, wrote Why we're leaving the cloud. Over the next three years the company moved its applications onto its own servers, then moved its files out of Amazon S3 onto its own storage, and published the numbers along the way.
It's the best-documented cloud exit by a well-known software company, and it's often quoted as proof that "the cloud is a rip-off". That isn't quite what DHH argued. His case was narrower and more useful: the cloud is a poor deal for a particular kind of company and workload, and a good one for others.
What they had
37signals ran its applications on AWS, including HEY, its email service. In the 2022 post, DHH wrote that HEY alone was paying over half a million dollars a year for Amazon's managed database (RDS) and search services. By the company's later account, its cloud bill had been running at about $3.2 million a year.