37signals is completing its on-prem move, deleting its AWS account to save millions
Industry ‘pulled a fast one convincing everyone cloud is the only way’ says CTO David Heinemeier Hansson
Web software biz 37signals has started to migrate its data out of the cloud and onto on-prem storage – and expects to save a further $1.3 million (£980,000) a year after completing its high-profile cloud repatriation project and getting off AWS once and for all.
We'll delete our entire AWS account and finally say goodbye to our ~$1.5m/year S3 hosting bill
37signals operates the project management tool Basecamp and a calendaring service called HEY. In 2022 the biz's CTO David Heinemeier Hansson (who created Ruby on Rails) started to quit AWS after being horrified by an annual spend exceeding $3.2 million (£2.4 million).
Hansson compared the cost of running workloads in the public cloud to the sums required to acquire and operate some hefty Dell servers, concluded enormous savings would be possible, and decided to make the move. In 2024 he shared the results of the compute repatriation project: after spending $700,000 (£530,000) on some Dell boxes that run workloads once hosted in AWS, cloud bills fell by some $2 million (£1.5 million) a year.
After that success, Hansson decided to also migrate 37signals’ data from Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) to on-prem arrays provided by Pure Storage. On Wednesday he used LinkedIn to reveal data migration is “about to start.”
That effort is off to a good start because AWS has waived $250,000 in egress fees – the cloud giant’s charge for downloading data. “It took a while to get it approved, but in the end we got it,” Hansson wrote.
“This means we'll be able to delete our entire AWS account this summer when the data is out. That'll be cause for quite some celebration when we finally say goodbye to our ~$1.5m/year S3 hosting bill!” he added.
37signals spent $1.5 million on 18 petabytes worth of Pure Storage kit that Hansson wrote will cost less than $200,000 a year to operate - a savings of $1.3 million a year in operating costs. He predicted those savings will “rack up pretty quick” once Chicago-based 37signals amortizes the cost of the arrays.
“Much easier to swallow than $1.5m/year!” he wrote, before adding that his company’s overall yearly infrastructure bill will drop from a cloudy $3.2 million “to well under a million” on-prem – without having to add extra staff.
“Cloud can be a good choice in certain circumstances, but the industry pulled a fast one convincing everyone it's the only way,” he concluded. “No wonder you see cloud vendors and ads and PR everywhere. There's so much money in convincing everyone that owning your own hardware is impossible or that operating Linux servers is too hard!” ®