Irrespective of the details, when a big name repatriates, word gets around. Dropbox made a splash when they migrated away from AWS storage service to their own custom-designed infrastructure starting in 2015. The company reported a cost of revenue savings of nearly $75 million starting in the first two years after the transition ($39.5 million from 2015 to 2016 and an additional $35.1 million in 2017).
More recently, in October 2022, web software company 37signals made news when its CTO and co-founder David Heinemeier Hansson wrote in a blog post that they’ll move their two main platforms—Basecamp (a project management platform) and HEY (a subscription-based email service)—off the cloud. However, they don’t intend to run their own data center, but rather work with a company that has carved out a niche providing a hybrid environment as a service.
“There are companies that specialize in this work,” Hansson says. “If your budget is of a size that this is appealing, that is, most likely, millions of dollars, you can afford to do this several times over with the savings you reap.”
Both Dropbox and 37signals have the motivation and capacity to make a switch since tech companies often rely more on compute and storage, and have a higher need for control and performance. They also have the expertise to pull off a reverse migration. Even though 37signals is working with Deft.com to repatriate, the move back from the cloud will require significant changes to the apps and data structures to get similar functionality in the new environment—the kinds of changes not every company has the skills to make.