Why Cloud Migration ROI Calculations Often Fail to Account for Hidden Costs
Engineers evaluating a move away from major cloud providers like AWS typically compare only compute and storage list prices, which represent roughly 40% of actual costs. Key overlooked expenses include egress fees — AWS charges around $0.09 per GB, totalling approximately $4,500 per month for platforms transferring 50TB — plus migration labour, parallel-run periods, and support contracts. Proprietary managed services such as RDS, DynamoDB, and Lambda create additional lock-in, as replacing them requires rewriting data-access layers, a cost analysts frequently underestimate by three to five times. For a mid-sized SaaS application with a 2TB database and 15 microservices, migration engineering alone can run 200–450 hours, translating to €16,000–€36,000 in upfront costs. A more accurate business case must itemise egress, managed-service replacement, one-time data transfer, cutover risk, and reserved-instance commitments before finance review.
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