37signals · DHH
$10M / 5 yr
Moved seven apps including HEY off AWS onto owned hardware. Savings passed $1M in year one and ran ahead of projections.
Source [5] →SOLUTIONS · CLOUD EXIT
Stop renting your database
Cloud exit isn't sentiment — it's arithmetic. This page is the ledger: unit prices, receipts, and the road out, every figure with a source.
Managed databases solved a real problem: running PostgreSQL well used to take a specialist, and renting one was the rational call. But year by year the DBA's craft — HA, backup and recovery, monitoring — has been built into open-source software. More and more, the rent buys scarcity that no longer exists.
Meanwhile the price curves have split for good. One vCPU running for one month: about ¥19 on a self-hosted dedicated server, ¥270–432 on Aliyun's HA RDS, ¥580–1,582 on AWS[1]. Hardware gets cheaper every year; RDS list prices barely move. Every year you stay, the gap between renting and owning compounds.
Owning doesn't mean going it alone. Pigsty packages the whole enterprise-PostgreSQL stack as open source, with the author's subscriptions and expert services behind it. Below: the ledger, then the road.
THE LEDGER
The three big line items, priced piece by piece
Database, compute, and object storage — reduced to common units, rent laid next to own. The stubby self-host bars are the whole argument.
01 · DATABASE · ¥/vCPU·MO
- IDC self-host (Pigsty) ¥19
- Aliyun ECS (1:8 RAM) ¥180
- Aliyun RDS HA (1:2) ¥270
- Aliyun PolarDB Enterprise (1:8) ¥400
- Aliyun RDS HA (1:8) ¥432
- AWS RDS single-AZ (1:4) ¥580
- AWS RDS Multi-AZ (1:4) ¥1,160
- AWS RDS Multi-AZ (1:8) ¥1,582
02 · RAW COMPUTE · ¥/vCPU·MO
- IDC container (5× oversold) ¥7
- IDC dedicated server ¥19
- UCloud VM (oversold) ¥25
- AWS c5d.metal, 3-yr prepaid ¥80
- Aliyun ECS (1:2, dedicated) ¥107
- Aliyun ECS (1:8, dedicated) ¥180
- AWS EC2 M5, on-demand ¥301
03 · OBJECT STORAGE · ¥/TB·MO
- AWS S3 Express One Zone ¥1,120
- AWS S3 Standard ¥161
- Self-host MinIO/Silo (3-replica) ¥44
- Bare enterprise NVMe (baseline) ¥15
AWS S3 Standard
Silo/MinIO self-host ×3
Bare NVMe baseline
View as table
| Option | 1 TB | 10 TB | 100 TB | 1 PB |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| AWS S3 Standard | ¥161/mo | ¥1,610/mo | ¥16,100/mo | ¥164,864/mo |
| Silo/MinIO self-host ×3 | ¥44/mo | ¥435/mo | ¥4,350/mo | ¥44,544/mo |
| Bare NVMe baseline | ¥15/mo | ¥145/mo | ¥1,450/mo | ¥14,848/mo |
CALCULATOR
Price out your own cluster
Spec, node count, storage, billing term, subscription tier — five dials to your scenario, and see what renting versus owning really costs.
RAM ratio
Term
Currency
Show
Aliyun RDS
AWS RDS
Aliyun ECS + Pigsty
IDC self-host + Pigsty
AWS has no standard RDS class at a 1:2 RAM ratio — that row is hidden for this selection.
View cost breakdown
| Option | Compute | Storage | Subscription | Total | Multiple |
|---|
Model: total = compute + storage (+ subscription on self-host rows). RDS at 1 node = basic single instance; 2 = HA pair; more = HA pair + read replicas (estimated). AWS long terms use 3-yr reserved (no 5-yr tier). Storage priced at Aliyun ESSD PL1 ¥1/GB·mo, AWS gp3 $0.08/GB·mo, self-host NVMe ¥14.5/TB·mo; cloud storage is counted once, conservatively (real bills add replica storage), self-host carries one full copy per node. Discount ladder: on-demand 1.5× · monthly 1× · 3-yr 0.45× · 5-yr 0.32× (Aliyun's ladder, applied to ECS as an estimate); no term discount applied to storage. People costs excluded on both sides.
PRICE TAGS
For reference: what everyone else charges
| Product | List price | Billing basis |
|---|---|---|
| Oracle Enterprise + RAC | ≈ ¥28,000 | / vCPU · year (22% annual-fee basis) |
| EDB BigAnimal Enterprise | $183.3 | / vCPU · month |
| Fujitsu PostgreSQL for K8s | $3,200 | / core · year |
| AWS RDS for PostgreSQL (HA) | ¥1,160–1,582 | / vCPU · month |
| Aliyun RDS for PostgreSQL (HA) | ¥270–432 | / vCPU · month |
| Pigsty subscription | $8K–60K | / node · year — vCPU uncounted |
"A fair price for decent database professional service is ¥10–20K a year." — commercial databases bill per core, so bigger boxes cost more; Pigsty bills per node and doesn't count your cores. Basis in the sources[svc].
METHODOLOGY & SOURCES
- Database & compute reduce to ¥ per vCPU·month (monthly instance price ÷ vCPU); object storage to ¥ per TB·month. Aliyun = east-China list prices (captured 2025-04); AWS = us-east at 7.24 CNY/USD; disk prices and subscription terms captured 2026-08-06.
- The ¥19/vCPU·mo self-host figure is a dedicated 64C/384G server over five years — same order as Tantan's (¥19.5) and DHH's (~¥25) published numbers; NVMe at ¥14.5/TB·mo is an enterprise drive over five years.
- Aliyun RDS single-instance ≈ HA price ÷ 2.35 (the list-price ratio across the dedicated basic series); AWS Multi-AZ = 2 × single-AZ (list relationship).
- Prices move — verify against the vendors' own pages: AWS RDS for PostgreSQL pricing · Alibaba Cloud price calculator.
- Are Cloud Databases an IQ Tax? — vonng.com/en/cloud/rds/
- Analyzing Alibaba Cloud Compute Cost — vonng.com/en/cloud/ecs/
- Is Cloud Block Storage a Slaughter Scam? — vonng.com/en/cloud/ebs/
- Paradigm Shift: From Cloud to Local-First — vonng.com/en/cloud/paradigm/
- DHH: Cloud-Exit Saved Over Ten Million — vonng.com/en/cloud/odyssey-done/
- How Ahrefs Saved $400M by Not Going Cloud — vonng.com/en/cloud/ahrefs-saving/
- Did RedNote Exit the Cloud? — vonng.com/en/cloud/rednote-cloud-exit/
- Dissecting Cloud Object Storage — vonng.com/en/cloud/s3/
- [svc] Pigsty subscription & service terms — https://pigsty.cc/docs/about/service (retrieved 2026-08-06)
- [ebsprice] AWS EBS pricing (us-east-1) — https://aws.amazon.com/ebs/pricing/ (retrieved 2026-08-06)
- [essdprice] Aliyun cloud-disk price reference — https://www.foreignserver.com/aliyun/sjpjiage2025.html (retrieved 2026-08-06)
RECEIPTS
The ones who left already showed their math
Ahrefs
$400M / 3 yr
The search-index giant priced its own datacenter against AWS list prices, line by line: staying off the cloud saved roughly $400M over three years.
Source [6] →Tantan · 探探
25,000 vCPU
Runs PostgreSQL & Redis on ~25,000 self-hosted cores at millions of QPS, with a DBA team of two to three — the ¥19.5 core·month reference behind the chart above.
Source [1] →RedNote · 小红书
Self-host first
A platform that grew up in the cloud-native era, now steering its infrastructure strategy toward self-hosting first.
Source [7] →These are public, third-party stories. Our own customers' names appear here only with written permission.
THE ROAD
Four steps out
Each step maps to a service tier that can catch you — from a single consultation to full coverage, your call.
1Assess
- Inventory instances, specs, dependencies
- Run the TCO math on your real bill
- Flag the hard parts, order the moves
≈ Quick Consultation $30 / issue · Expert Session $400 / session
2Pilot
- One spare machine, one command
- Move a non-critical workload first
- Prove HA & PITR on the dashboards
≈ Open Source · Free
3Migrate
- Logical replication keeps data in sync
- Rehearse cutover and rollback
- Execute in a planned, minutes-long window
≈ Emergency Response $4,000 / day
4Operate
- Self-healing HA & automated backups take the routine
- Dashboards and alerts take the night shift
- A subscription takes the hard cases
≈ Subscription from $8K/year
OBJECTIONS
The three pushbacks you'll hear
"Self-hosting is an ops burden."
It was, when HA, backups, and monitoring were hand-built. Pigsty ships them as software — it gives a junior engineer 70%+ of a professional DBA's capability — and the author's expert services stand behind the hardest stretch. Tantan's two-to-three-person DBA team running 25,000 cores is this logic, proven.
"We can't do HA as well as the cloud."
You don't have to build it: self-healing failover on Patroni + etcd and point-in-time recovery with pgBackRest ship as defaults. A real cluster runs in the open at demo.pigsty.io — go look.
"Compliance won't allow it."
Self-hosting is usually the compliant path, not the risky one: data stays in your jurisdiction on your keys, offline and air-gapped delivery is supported, and the Ansible IaC leaves an audit trail. A dedicated trust page is on its way — until then, ask us directly.
THE ESSAYS
Read the whole argument
This page is the digest. The full case — data, receipts, and philosophy — lives in the author's four-year cloud-exit column. These essays are the way in.
The math
The receipts
Let's price out your exit
Send a recent invoice and a spec list — you'll get a straight answer on whether the math works for you.
FAQ
Cloud-exit questions, answered
Is self-hosting really cheaper than cloud RDS?
For steady production workloads, yes — usually by multiples. The numbers above are list prices you can verify; run your own spec through the calculator, then check it against a real invoice. The gap widens with scale.
Don't we need a full-time DBA to self-host?
Pigsty packages top-tier DBA judgment into software — it gives a junior engineer 70%+ of a professional DBA's capability. For the hard remainder, subscriptions and expert services are served by the people who wrote the code.
What about high availability and disaster recovery?
Self-healing HA on Patroni and etcd, point-in-time recovery with pgBackRest, and 600+ metrics per instance watching it all — the guarantees RDS sells, in software you control. A live cluster runs in the open at demo.pigsty.io.
How disruptive is the migration itself?
The path is incremental: assess first, pilot on a spare machine (one command), then cut over with logical replication and a rehearsed rollback plan. When logical replication fits your schema, the cutover window comes down to minutes — and the assessment tells you whether it fits.
We're not even on PostgreSQL yet — does this still apply?
Yes. Pigsty ships 12 swappable kernels with MSSQL / Oracle / MySQL / Mongo compatibility options, and Oracle-to-PostgreSQL migration is one of our standard expert engagements.