37signals saved $10M+ leaving the cloud but most mid-market companies cannot replicate this because they lack the ops team to run bare metal

37signals (makers of Basecamp and HEY) publicly documented saving approximately $2 million per year after repatriating from AWS and Google Cloud — reducing their cloud bill from $3.2 million to $1.3 million annually — and projected $7 million in savings over five years. Dropbox similarly saved $39.5 million in 2016 alone by moving petabytes of user data from AWS S3 to owned infrastructure. Yet 86% of CIOs surveyed in late 2024 said they planned to repatriate some workloads, indicating widespread cost frustration, while very few have actually done so. Why it matters: companies see the 37signals case study and want to replicate it, so they investigate on-premises or colocation options, so they discover they need to hire 3-5 additional infrastructure engineers at $200K+ each, so the savings evaporate for any company without pre-existing hardware operations expertise, so most companies stay on the cloud feeling trapped between unaffordable cloud bills and unachievable repatriation. The structural root cause is that cloud computing bundled operational expertise (patching, scaling, redundancy, disaster recovery) into the price of compute, so companies that adopted cloud never built those internal capabilities — and now that cloud costs have risen, they find themselves paying a premium for convenience they cannot practically unbundle.