Colin Baumgart, Microsoft South Africa

The US software company 37Signals, the developers of Basecamp, left the cloud in 2022. Co-founder David Heinemeier Hansson said at the time that he expected to save $7 million over five years by moving its hosting back to on-premises. A bill of $3 201 564 from AWS triggered the move and by the end of what Hansson called its first “clean year”, 37Signals had saved nearly $2 million. The company bought $700 000 of Dell systems to replace its cloud systems, but has retained some AWS S3 cloud instances that are under contract and may be removed when the time comes.

Another big name – Akamai – reduced its hyperscale investment and saved 40% in its first year. The company migrated its third-party public cloud workloads to its own public cloud infrastructure.