Private cloud vs AWS: the real TCO, line by line
Ten-thousand-foot 'AWS is expensive' takes are easy. Doing the math is harder. Here's the math, with every assumption visible.
Cloud repatriation became a popular term in 2024. Most articles about it skip the actual numbers. We're going to do the math.
Consider a mid-size B2B SaaS at $4M ARR, 800 customers, 12 application containers, a Postgres primary + read replica, an Elasticsearch cluster, and roughly 8TB of egress per month.
On AWS: us-east-1, m6i.2xlarge × 12 (containers), db.r6g.4xlarge primary + replica (Postgres), self-managed 3-node Elasticsearch on m6i.xlarge, S3 storage of ~12TB, CloudFront in front. Add data transfer, NAT gateway, Route 53, GuardDuty, CloudWatch.
Twelve-month AWS bill, full reserved instance discount applied: ~$168,000. Without reservations: ~$232,000.
Same workload on Ultiblob Pro tier × 4 (sharded by service) + Scale tier × 1 (database) + dedicated FlashArray slice + included egress: ~$77,000/yr. That includes the managed service — monitoring, patching, on-call.
The savings aren't from a magic discount. They're from removing four things: shared-tenancy overhead, NAT gateway and inter-AZ data charges, managed-service surcharges, and the operational headcount AWS implicitly assumes you have.
Ultiblob's tradeoff: you give up some elasticity (we'll provision more capacity within 4 business hours, not 4 seconds) and some regional breadth (two regions, not 30). For workloads that don't need either, the math is decisive.
Run your own numbers in the estimator, or send us your last AWS bill and we'll do the line-by-line for free.
