A Five-Step Cost Comparison for Leaving the Public Cloud

A cloud exit moves workloads from rented provider infrastructure onto servers an organisation runs and pays for directly, and a cost comparison determines whether that move pays off. The proposed method has five steps: reviewing twelve months of invoices, sorting each line into storage, transfer or compute, pricing those categories at published rates, adding hardware, power, space and staffing costs, and calculating a break-even date. The author notes that providers' egress charges and inter-region transfer rates differ, and cites a 2023 projection by 37signals comparing roughly $3.2 million in annual cloud spend against lower projected on-premises costs. Hidden expenses such as redundancy, spare parts, patching, on-call coverage and migration work can determine whether the projected savings hold up. The break-even date reduces the analysis to a single figure that finance teams can use to approve or reject the move.