37signals Says Goodbye to AWS: Full S3 Migration and $10M in Projected Savings
42 comments
·May 9, 2025bcoughlan
snowwrestler
If you’re comfortable where you are as a business, and not looking for more than steady revenue growth in your core market, then finding efficiencies is a fine use of time.
I know that mindset is antithetical to the VC “make every chart a hockey stick” culture, which is well-represented here on HN. But actually tons of businesses are run that way.
Imustaskforhelp
I agree.
Tech is seen in this very biased lens because Tech seems to be the only place imo that VC's are genuinely interested in seeing very high growth in.
They want to know that they have bet on the next google and they want to know it fast.
Actually, it is real funny that we are talking about this on a forum which is funded by y-combinator/ a lot of this VC nuance.
I don't know man, if I can be honest or not, but I was thinking for a moment and the whole idea of tech seems to be a lot more overflated man... , as a dev, I was just thinking about the influence of money and I was genuinely just wondering what is the fastest way I can make money and It was probably creating a proprietory product and selling the startup / getting VC fund-ed and not organic growth.
I am still very nuanced though, on one hand, both of these go against my personal philosophy, I myself would "love" to open source (preferably MIT but hey AGPL would also cut the deal like the recent redis...) my product and probably have no 0 VC funding.
But on the other hand, I am not sure, A lot of what I feel like building, is probably immature, its better off hidden. I am using Ai to build a lot of stuff for now, and I am not quite proud of it.
I feel, that as someone who has made very meaningless contributions (I guess?) in my past and while I was writing this comment, I was getting this vague sense of an issue being popped up on whatever software I create with "WHY DOESN'T IT WORK" and no issues or nothing.... I don't know, it makes it less lucrative to open source, quite frankly any product.
Maybe I want an AI which can genuinely resolve such very meaningless issues but I also don't trust AI, what if there are some issues which are actually good and AI filters it wrong.
I don't know man. I was thinking about this yesterday and I just realized that I am not thinking this much, I would do whatever I think in the heat of the moment.
ndriscoll
Building revenue generating things is hard (you have to figure out new things that people will pay for). Writing new features also requires generally different skill sets than operating servers. Running software in a datacenter is a more defined problem with straightforward ROI.
DoesntMatter22
Saving 2 million a year for a company their size is guaranteed more money in their pocket. Revenue generating features may or may not do that.
jakupovic
More money in the company pocket. More work for the people who did the migration and now maintaining their own cloud. Then when the people who put this together leave, the rest are stuck with one of a kind cloud.
Maybe a good idea, but if it's only saving money that can only happen 1 time, then people expect the same cost going forward ...
jimlawruk
> building something revenue-generating
"a pound saved is a pound earned"
dismalaf
They've talked about this at length in both blog posts and podcasts. The gist is that all the Amazon cloud stuff still took effort, their ops team is essentially the same size and they're actually saving all this money.
Taikonerd
LOL, this has been my experience working with AWS. "We can fire 3 sysadmins, because Amazon will handle all this ops work for us!"
But then also: "we need to hire 3 AWS Cloud Engineers, because administering AWS requires a bunch of ops work."
jbverschoor
Decisions made by the uninformed aka idiots.
There’s a good case for aws, but if that’s the narrative… it’s time to be replaced by someone or something else
cube00
Just goes to show how greedy AWS has become with pricing now that everyone is locked in. If anything they should be able to use their scale to make it cheaper than doing it on-prem and all the costs that go with that. Strangely at the time it did appear cheaper when we all moved to cloud for these so called savings a decade ago.
Imustaskforhelp
it does appear cheaper because you can handle the highest workloads for just a fraction of the total cost if you had to host the highest workload yourself.
Like lets say my company gets a very huge spike and lets say I wanted to be prepared for it for all times in baremetal, then I had to had a lot of vacant free metal.
But I personally believe that a dual strategy should be used, a minimum amount of stuff should be baremetal for the average traffic and only for huge spikes should cloud be used.
Except, clouds seem to be a lock-in, so people prefered the clouds untill the cloud started raining and asking them for a big ton of money.
ahofmann
This old tale gets always told, and it is still a lie. Since AWS exists, every five years someone calculated the cost of AWS for our PHP stuff. And the results were always the same: we could have 4 to 7 times more CPU, ram, storage and bandwidth when we just rent servers somewhere. AWS is ridiculously expensive and renting servers was always the cheaper and better option (yes, we calculated the price for our system admins). Never was any spike of usage, or growth, a problem for our servers and software.
dumbledoren
> just a fraction of the total cost if you had to host the highest workload yourself. Like lets say my company gets a very huge spike and lets say I wanted to be prepared for it for all times in baremetal, then I had to had a lot of vacant free metal
Huh? Autoscaling turned out to be a myth. Even in k8, you cant make users wait for nodes to come online, so you have to always have spare nodes waiting. And the spare nodes must be in proportion to regular spikes you expect and additionally any unexpected spike that you estimate. Why would that be different from having extra free metal for much cheaper and simpler? Along with an easier time finding infra people who can manage that as opposed to finding expensive talent with the expensive bloat of technical knowledge that AWS today requires?
Lets face it - this is the enshittification of infra brought by the lock-in Amazon was able to lure the orgs into. First, they locked-in everyone. Now they are squeezing everyone dry.
troyvit
> The company estimates it will save more than $10 million over the next five years, reducing its annual infrastructure bill from $3.2 million to less than $1 million — all managed by the same technical team that previously handled the cloud.
It would be cool to get more into this. One of the reasons my (much smaller) org insists on S3 (or possibly R2) is that they feel they are paying rent for the infrastructure management that they would otherwise have to hire for. If there was data out there that showed that an org could switch to a less managed infrastructure without pulling people off of other projects to fill in the gaps it would be an awesome selling point.
al_borland
I’ve been on a team managing on-prem data centers for nearly 2 decades at a larger place.
At one point they did a study to see if it would be cheaper to go to AWS, and the conclusion was that it was cheaper to run our own. We have some stuff in the public cloud now, but it’s still more expensive than running our own.
One of the biggest things I see, at least on the surface, is that there are certain sunk costs with on-prem. If you can do more with the same hardware (licensing costs aside), it really doesn’t cost much to add a VM or container. Whereas with the public cloud everything comes with a price tag and there is a much greater cost to leaving your dev server running when not actively using it, or that pet project that is helpful, but not in a way that’s quantifiable in dollars and cents. This is how companies end up with old laptops in closets and under desks running critical tools.
adamcharnock
This is exactly what we do (but now you mention this I think we should spell this out much more clearly to our potential customers)
We move companies onto bare metal, effectively giving them their own private cloud. This about halves their costs, doesn’t impact their engineering team as we handle the migration, and then we also include ongoing monthly engineering time to support their infra team. Overall it is a win-win for everyone (well, except AWS)
Imustaskforhelp
by bare metal, are we saying things like hetzner, ovh? or full on, renting servers spaces themselves like railway?(I am not sure if it was railway or render) did a while back
adamcharnock
It’s both, we can rack up hardware if there is the need. But building, racking, and financing servers is a fairly well solved problem (especially here in the EU). So, in general, if we can avoid solving that problem ourselves we will.
gnabgib
Related It's five grand a day to miss our S3 exit (187 points, 1 month ago, 176 points) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43489698
rthnbgrredf
18 PB is not a trivial amount of storage. I think what most people always underestimate is how much engineering effort it takes in the background to keep such big infrastructure up and running reliably.
I would like to have a detailed total cost of ownership calculation. Of course, renting hardware - let's say in Hetzner or some other cheap provider - is always cheaper than AWS or any other major cloud provider in simple 1:1 pricing comparison. So that is nothing new. But the pure CPU/RAM/SSD costs is just a fraction of what it really costs to run such infrastructure.
jbverschoor
It’s 2000 8tb SSDs ($1m), or a thousand 18TB disks ($350k)
Times something for redundancy / backup.
The hardware investment is back within a year. This is about what I would say many aws services cost. After a year, you’re just giving away your margin to Amazon.
The original story for EC2 was ephemeral, short lived/on-demand compute. This was during the time when map-reduce was all the hype.
RaSoJo
>>all managed by the same technical team that previously handled the cloud.
Does this imply they haven’t hired any additional personnel? I would’ve thought moving everything in-house would need more hands on deck—for stuff like security, keeping things up and running, and all the behind-the-scenes stuff AWS usually takes care of.
If they managed with the same team, that’s darned impressive.
zerotolerance
Much of the work "security, keeping things up and running" that AWS does behinds the scenes is bolstered due to the nature of running a massively complicated multi-tenant cloud. Doing exactly what you need in-house is orders of magnitude simpler, but has a deeper knowledge requirement. The cloud is a powerful way for companies to commoditize skill.
datadrivenangel
Do note that it took them ~2 years to move off of S3. The ROI of getting off of compute and hosted services is often there, but S3 is still pretty great from a business perspective.
mchusma
I’ve become increasingly frustrated with AWS because of this. They used to have a culture of providing constant price performance improvements. Not anymore. Every release has questionable improvements (for example, switching from r6 to r7 family of instances is more expensive with theoretically better performance but you probably can’t actually switch and save money). S3 costs haven’t gone done in a long time despite plummeting storage costs.
Very excited about the work done by 37Signals to encourage moving off.
WD-42
Good for them. It is becoming tiring paying rent seekers to run our own software.
jbverschoor
Why was not the original post posted by DHH, instead of the advertorial?
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/david-heinemeier-hansson-374b...
adt
The advertorial with weird misspellings in the graphics...
janalsncm
I see something analogous happening in about 5 years with LLMs when people realize they can get 80% of the value for 20% of the cost by using an on-site model rather than paying out the nose to OpenAI.
rawgabbit
I remember when the discussion was how to escape the lock-in by hardware vendors such as EMC and Dell. I believe a lot of initial desire to go cloud was the idea it was easier to migrate from AWS to Azure to GCP if necessary. Now we know that such migrations are multi year efforts. Exactly like in the bad old days.
betaby
> I remember when the discussion was how to escape the lock-in by hardware vendors such as EMC and Dell.
Somehow I've never heard about EMC/Dell in a context of the lock-in.
rawgabbit
Twenty years ago if you bought a multi million dollar SAN from EMC, the rep would tell you the included support would be free if you also bought X Y or Z. If you bought a data center widget from another vendor, it may void your support agreement etc.
devonbleak
All the times I heard about lock-in was a vendor trying to get me to avoid locking into their competitor and lock into them.
Imustaskforhelp
Just my two cents on this topic.
What we are looking for, are easier migrations in cloud I suppose and multi cloud strategy.
I am pretty sure that 37Signals had gotten their servers set up in a lot of countries for easier latency but a lot of companies can't.
We are then forced to use S3 or the likes and honestly I am starting to wonder about S3....
Like I was watching theo's video on everything being a wrapper and he mentioned that in some sense he basically created uploadthing because s3 was cheaper but had higher egress and cloudflare r2 was more expensive but had no egress and so he wanted a way to optimize it... thus uploadthing.
But this whole idea seems so bizarringly stupid to me, I had seen a website which compared such providers pricing and to be quite frank, cloudflare was in the lowest maybe only more expensive than backblaze or wasabi but both of these had a sort of fair use limit which might be vague...
In the meanwhile, I have found another website giving some decent comparisons and though I don't like its UI as much as the other website which had some really cool graphs.., its also well built and professional https://www.s3compare.io/
and I have to say, somebody might see the amazon 4$ per Tb compared to cloudflare 15$ per tb and could've said wow maybe theo was right... untill they saw the 90.00 USD/tb...
I mean, I get that but if that has to be an archive / very rarely accessed, then why not just use wasabi or backblaze (I was going to prefer backblaze untill I saw the 10$ per tb egress for backblaze and 0 $ for wasabi.... yeah)
wasabi/backblaze both seems to be really great options, they are just fractionally more expensive than Aws s3 glacier (4.99$ per Tb) and they don't have egregious egress fees....
For something more frequent, use cloudflare r2 and for archiving/backup, use wasabi/backblaze , maybe even the 3-2-1 strategy... I am not sure if wasabi/backblaze already follow that
Something an older and wiser programmer taught me, is to think of the infrastructure costs as a per-user cost. These numbers look enormous next to my bank balance, but if you save 500k per year to service 1 million users, it's nothing to your bottom line.
Meanwhile there's the opportunity cost of moving. All of the people who put effort into this migration, who could otherwise be building something revenue-generating. I think that's why in many companies cloud costs are a problem, but never enough to make it high up the backlog.