Basecamp’s AWS bill plunge

Basecamp’s parent company says moving its apps off Amazon Web Services cut its infrastructure bill by millions of dollars a year. (basecamp.com) 37signals, the company behind Basecamp and HEY, said it pulled seven apps out of Amazon Web Services in 2023 and onto its own hardware without adding staff. The company says that shift will reduce infrastructure costs by between half and two-thirds over five years. (basecamp.com) The company first disclosed a $3.2 million cloud budget for 2022, then said it bought about $600,000 of Dell servers to support the move. In a later update, DHH said the hardware bill ended up around $700,000 and was fully recouped during 2023. (world.hey.com 1) (world.hey.com 2) By early 2024, 37signals said its annual run rate had fallen to about $1.3 million from $3.2 million, with the remaining spend mostly tied to Amazon S3 storage. DHH said that was the first “clean year” after longer cloud contracts expired. (world.hey.com) This is a fight over where software runs. Public cloud means renting computing and storage from companies like Amazon; on-premises means buying servers outright and operating them in data centers the company controls. (basecamp.com) 37signals argues that its workloads were steady enough that renting stopped making financial sense. DHH said the company had already heavily optimized its Amazon bill before leaving, and that the same operations team now runs the services on its own machines. (world.hey.com) The last big piece was storage. In 2024, DHH said 37signals still kept almost 10 petabytes of data in Amazon S3 under a four-year contract signed in 2021, and planned to replace it with a dual-data-center Pure Storage system. (world.hey.com) By May 2025, The Stack reported that DHH said the storage move would eliminate a roughly $1.5 million annual S3 bill, after a hardware outlay of about $1.5 million for 18 petabytes of capacity across two data centers. He said the yearly cost after amortizing that purchase would fall below $200,000. (thestack.technology) Amazon has also changed one cost that long frustrated cloud customers: data egress, the fee for moving data out. In March 2024, AWS said customers moving all of their data off AWS can request free data transfer out to the internet, subject to support approval and program terms. (aws.amazon.com 1) (aws.amazon.com 2) 37signals presents its move as proof that cloud economics can reverse for mature software companies with predictable demand. Its own figures now frame the bet in simple terms: buy the servers once, and stop paying the rental bill every year. (basecamp.com) (world.hey.com)