Honest, sourced cost breakdowns for moving the expensive parts of your stack off AWS — with the real numbers, including the cost of running it yourself, and the cases where you should stay.
CloudWatch Logs Insights bills ~$0.005 per GB your queries scan, not per GB you store — so an always-on Grafana dashboard becomes a metered query loop. Self-hosted Grafana + Loki on a flat-rate box makes querying free. The short comparison, with a link to the full setup.
Cloud cost optimization (FinOps) tools and consultancies — ProsperOps, Vantage, CloudHealth, Spot, the Duckbill Group — cut your AWS bill 20–40% without leaving AWS. Here's how they do it, how they charge (and the incentive to watch), the structural ceiling they can't cross, and the honest line: when to optimize and stay vs when leaving actually wins. With sources.
The lowest-risk way to cut a cloud bill: keep your app, compute and database on AWS, and move only the egress-heavy object storage to a zero-egress S3-compatible store (Cloudflare R2, Backblaze B2) — or just put a CDN in front. Keep S3 as your source of truth and fallback. Reversible, config-level, no app rewrite. When the hybrid is enough, and when it isn't. With sources.
RDS, Azure, and Cloud SQL bundle more than backups: automatic failover (Multi-AZ), version upgrades and patching, read replicas, monitoring. Here's the open-source equivalent for each — Patroni, streaming replication, Prometheus — which are easy, which are real work, and the honest middle path: a flat-rate managed Postgres that escapes egress without making you run HA yourself. With sources.
ECS, ECR, Auto Scaling, WAF, Terraform — every AWS managed service has an open-source equivalent you can own. Here's the honest mapping, which ones you actually need off-cloud, and the one (autoscaling) that's the real reason to stay. With sources.
HashiCorp moved Terraform to the source-available BUSL license in 2023; OpenTofu is the truly-open, drop-in fork under the Linux Foundation. Here's the honest difference, what OpenTofu does that Terraform doesn't, when to stay on Terraform, and how to migrate in an afternoon. With sources.
You can reproduce RDS automated backups (point-in-time recovery) and EBS volume snapshots on a plain OVH/Hetzner server with mature open-source tools: pgBackRest to object storage, ZFS + sanoid/syncoid for instant volume images, restic for files — with auto-expiry and immutable buckets that beat the AWS defaults. With sources.
AWS charges $0.09/GB to move your own data out of S3 — a price unchanged since 2018. Here is what egress means, what it costs at 1 TB to 500 TB/month, what 50 TB actually looks like for a real business, and four honest ways to cut it — with sources.
CloudWatch bills $0.50/GB to ingest logs and $0.30 per custom metric — a monitoring bill that often rivals the servers it watches. Here's what CloudWatch really costs at scale, and the open-source stack (Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, VictoriaMetrics) that replaces it for ~90% less — honestly, including the ops.
MinIO's open-source server has been wound down. Here are the production-ready S3-compatible replacements — SeaweedFS, Garage, Cloudflare R2, Backblaze B2 — with real cost numbers, including egress, and a clear pick for each situation.
The honest answer to the #1 objection to leaving the cloud: how DDoS protection, uptime and failover really work off AWS — including where you're stronger, where you're weaker, and how to reach 99.9% without a hyperscaler.
AWS egress cost explained: the per-GB tiers, what it adds up to from 1 TB to 500 TB/month, the hidden transfer lines, and how to cut it (R2, a CDN, or a flat-rate box). Dated, sourced.
AWS Backup egress cost explained: the per-GB tiers, what it adds up to from 1 TB to 500 TB/month, the hidden transfer lines, and how to cut it (R2, a CDN, or a flat-rate box). Dated, sourced.
CloudFront egress cost explained: the per-GB tiers, what it adds up to from 1 TB to 500 TB/month, the hidden transfer lines, and how to cut it (R2, a CDN, or a flat-rate box). Dated, sourced.
Azure egress cost explained: the per-GB tiers, what it adds up to from 1 TB to 500 TB/month, the hidden transfer lines, and how to cut it (R2, a CDN, or a flat-rate box). Dated, sourced.
Azure Blob Storage egress cost explained: the per-GB tiers, what it adds up to from 1 TB to 500 TB/month, the hidden transfer lines, and how to cut it (R2, a CDN, or a flat-rate box). Dated, sourced.
Google Cloud egress cost explained: the per-GB tiers, what it adds up to from 1 TB to 500 TB/month, the hidden transfer lines, and how to cut it (R2, a CDN, or a flat-rate box). Dated, sourced.
Google Cloud Storage egress cost explained: the per-GB tiers, what it adds up to from 1 TB to 500 TB/month, the hidden transfer lines, and how to cut it (R2, a CDN, or a flat-rate box). Dated, sourced.
CloudFront vs bunny.net at 100 TB/mo: about $7,132/mo on AWS vs $1,074/mo on bunny.net (incl. priced ops), 85% lower 5-year TCO, break-even in 0 months. Dated, sourced.
CloudFront vs bunny.net at 10 TB/mo: about $783/mo on AWS vs $152/mo on bunny.net (incl. priced ops), 78% lower 5-year TCO, break-even in 2 months. Dated, sourced.
CloudFront vs bunny.net at 50 TB/mo: about $4,060/mo on AWS vs $562/mo on bunny.net (incl. priced ops), 86% lower 5-year TCO, break-even in 0 months. Dated, sourced.
Amazon S3 vs Backblaze B2 at 100 TB/mo: about $10,237/mo on AWS vs $995/mo on Backblaze B2 (incl. priced ops), 90% lower 5-year TCO, break-even in 0 months. Dated, sourced.
Amazon S3 vs Backblaze B2 at 10 TB/mo: about $1,152/mo on AWS vs $190/mo on Backblaze B2 (incl. priced ops), 81% lower 5-year TCO, break-even in 2 months. Dated, sourced.
Amazon S3 vs Backblaze B2 at 50 TB/mo: about $5,553/mo on AWS vs $548/mo on Backblaze B2 (incl. priced ops), 90% lower 5-year TCO, break-even in 0 months. Dated, sourced.
Amazon S3 vs Cloudflare R2 at 100 TB/mo: about $10,237/mo on AWS vs $1,800/mo on Cloudflare R2 (incl. priced ops), 82% lower 5-year TCO, break-even in 0 months. Dated, sourced.
Amazon S3 vs Cloudflare R2 at 10 TB/mo: about $1,152/mo on AWS vs $270/mo on Cloudflare R2 (incl. priced ops), 74% lower 5-year TCO, break-even in 2 months. Dated, sourced.
Amazon S3 vs Cloudflare R2 at 50 TB/mo: about $5,553/mo on AWS vs $950/mo on Cloudflare R2 (incl. priced ops), 82% lower 5-year TCO, break-even in 0 months. Dated, sourced.
Amazon S3 vs SeaweedFS at 100 TB/mo: about $10,237/mo on AWS vs $2,700/mo on SeaweedFS (incl. priced ops), 73% lower 5-year TCO, break-even in 1 months. Dated, sourced.
Amazon S3 vs SeaweedFS at 10 TB/mo: about $1,152/mo on AWS vs $1,025/mo on SeaweedFS (incl. priced ops), 4% lower 5-year TCO, break-even in 39 months. Dated, sourced.
Amazon S3 vs SeaweedFS at 50 TB/mo: about $5,553/mo on AWS vs $1,940/mo on SeaweedFS (incl. priced ops), 64% lower 5-year TCO, break-even in 1 months. Dated, sourced.