David Heinemeier Hansson, CTO of 37Signals – which operates project management platform Basecamp and other products – has detailed the colossal cloud bills that saw the outfit quit the cloud in October 2022.

The CTO and creator of Ruby On Rails did all the sums and came up with an eye-watering cloud bill for $3,201,564 in 2022 – or $266,797 each month.

Most of that spend – $759,983 – went on compute, in the form of Amazon Web Services’ EC2 and EKS services.

On Twitter, Hansson contrasted that cost with the spend needed to acquire servers packing 288 vCPUs and plenty more besides over three years.

Contrast that with just this one example of insanely powerful iron you can buy from Dell. The first R6525s have 256GB RAM, 3TB NVM, 2x10G net, 2x AMD EPYC 7513. Second, same, but 2x AMD EPYC 7443. So that’s a total of 288 vCPU, 15TB NVM, 1.3TB RAM for $1,287/month over 3 years! pic.twitter.com/l1qap