Basecamp Details ‘Obscene’ $3.2 Million Bill That Prompted It To Quit the Cloud
An anonymous reader shares a report: 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 e … ⌘ Read more

Hmmmm this story from Basemap and 37Signals in the cost of Cloud is really interesting to me. When I left Facebook™ I left with an internal post asking and discussions:

At what point or what scale does “Cloud” become too expensive.

The answer to this question may vary depending on your use-case / needs; but even at small-scale like running a home lab / mini dc like I do, the cost of cloud is insane (mostly in storage for me, but the compute would be kind of nuts too).

Remember kids:

Cloud™ is not cheaper.

@abucci@anthony.buc.ci You are right, its not just economics that are and have been driving many folks and companies to the so-called proverbial “Cloud”™ – What is it then? Convenience? Scale? Flexibility? All these points in my experience are kind of bullshit. Part of me thinks we need to go back to our root and rethink how we’ve evolved software and services over the years. It shouldn’t ever cost hundreds of thousands to run basically what amounts to “project management” software.

There’s sin infamous guy that proved this once where he ran something that scaled to stupid amounts of scale on a few bucks a month. I forget what the site/service was though… Anyone? 🤔

And… As y’all know, I’m a big promoter of Self Hosted software, services and running shit™ on your own infra 😅

So… Just out of curiosity (again), back of paper napkin math. Based on Vultr pricing, running my infra in the “Cloud”™ would cost me upwards of $1300 per month. That’s about ~10x more than my current power bill for my entire household 😅 (10 VMs of around ~4 vCPUS and 4-6GB of RAM each + 10TB of storage on the NAS)

@prologic@twtxt.net At least when it comes to personal use, it also depends on how much data you’re storing, how important it is and how much you’re fine with using dirty tactics.

For a lot of people the free options are enough, or the combination of them, at least. Neither is there anything, preventing you, from using alts on those services (other than the impracticality, of having everything on a different account).

For data you want to share, but don’t mind loosing, there’s also sites, that let you forcefully connect your account to some companys paid Google storage, that you can then use, until they find and kick you, or cancel their subscription - but they can never get your OG Google account banned for doing this.

Lastly there’s also Chinese companies, that let you save upto 1 or 2 TB, in return for most likely mining that data, having it linked to some adware and wanting money for faster download speeds. These services can also be exploited to get those paid speeds and features for free and the ability to use it without the adware, making it usable, if you don’t care if the data is private.

So you can have all the cloud you want, for free. What you pay for is privacy (or the illusion of it), convenience and the peace in mind, that you’re not a “cloud pirate”.