Cloud Exit Calculator
How much could you save by leaving the cloud?
Compare your cloud bill with three ways out: rent VPS servers, rent dedicated servers, or buy servers and put them in a colocation facility. The numbers are estimates, and every assumption is editable.
Your cloud bill, per month
VMs, containers, serverless
RDS, Cloud SQL, and similar
Object and block storage
Data transfer out
Your workload and team
Across VMs, containers, and databases
Fully loaded: salary, taxes, benefits
Option 1: rent VPS servers
US servers cost slightly more and include far less traffic.
Fraction of one full-time engineer. No hardware, but you run your own databases.
Option 2: rent dedicated servers
Hetzner swaps failed hardware. You run the OS, disks, and databases.
Option 3: buy your own servers
Fraction of one full-time engineer. Hardware, network, and databases.
Edit assumptions
Capacity bought per vCPU used
Check Hetzner's current rate
Server auction, i7-7700, 64 GB, checked October 5, 2026
Estimate
| Cloud today | VPS | Rented dedicated | Own servers | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly cost | ||||
| Upfront cost | ||||
| Monthly saving | ||||
| Payback | ||||
| 3-year total |
Hetzner VPS and server auction prices checked on October 5, 2026, excluding VAT. Other defaults are estimates; change them under "Edit assumptions".
VPS breakdown
Per month
Upfront
Rented dedicated breakdown
Per month
Upfront
Own servers breakdown
Per month
Upfront
A smaller step: move only object storage to R2
Keep your servers where they are and move the files people download to Cloudflare R2, which has no egress fees. No new servers to run.
S3, GCS, or Azure Blob only, per month
R2 Standard: $0.015 per GB-month, $0.36 per million reads, $4.50 per million writes, no egress fees. Cloud egress is priced at your own bill's rate per TB. Free tier ignored. R2 pricing, checked October 5, 2026. For a detailed R2 versus S3 comparison, use Cloudflare's R2 calculator.
Big database or Cloudflare bill?
I audit PostgreSQL and MySQL performance and Cloudflare setups. Fixed price, with a written report of what to change.
Latency
- Same machine: a call over loopback takes about 0.05 ms or less. A call between two availability zones in the cloud is typically 0.5–2 ms.
- Same rack: about 0.1–0.3 ms, close to calls within a single cloud zone. The gain comes from removing cross-zone hops, load balancers, and NAT, not from the hardware itself.
- Who notices: chatty workloads that make many database queries or service calls per request. The saving repeats on every call.
Tools that make leaving practical
When you leave, you replace the managed services yourself: deploys, orchestration, object storage, and the database migration.
Deploys
Zero-downtime Docker deploys to any server you can SSH into: bare metal, colo, or VPS. No Kubernetes needed.
Kubernetes
A certified, lightweight Kubernetes distribution that ships as a single binary. For when you already run on Kubernetes and want to keep it on your own servers.
Database migration with change data capture
Streams every insert, update, and delete from your cloud database, in commit order. Keeps the new database in sync until you switch, so the cutover only needs a short pause in writes.
Object storage and offsite backups
S3-compatible object storage at a fraction of the big clouds' price per TB. Use it for offsite backups of your own servers.
Global object storage
S3-compatible object storage with one global endpoint: data is spread across regions and reads come from the closest one. No egress fees.
Self-hosted object storage
S3-compatible object storage written in Rust that you run on your own disks. A MinIO alternative under the Apache 2.0 license instead of AGPL.
How to calculate savings from moving off the public cloud to colocation
- Split your cloud bill into compute, managed databases, storage, and egress. Each one moves differently.
- Price the hardware for your peak load plus headroom and redundancy. You pay for it upfront.
- Add colocation: rack space, power, and a committed bandwidth port.
- Add people. Someone has to run the hardware, and the databases you used to get managed. In the example below it's the largest monthly cost.
- Add the one-time migration cost: engineering time to move and test everything.
- Compare. Payback in months is the upfront cost divided by the monthly difference. Then compare three-year totals.
Worked example
Illustrative numbers, not a quote. These are the calculator's starting values; its "Own servers" column matches this example.
Cloud today
Colo, per month
Colo, upfront
The monthly difference is $20,000 − $9,250 = $10,750. Payback is $145,000 ÷ $10,750 ≈ 14 months.
Over three years the cloud costs $720,000. Colo costs $145,000 + 36 × $9,250 = $478,000, so leaving saves about $242,000.
With the same inputs, renting dedicated servers comes out cheapest over three years, at about $437,000, because there's no hardware to buy. At a $5,000 monthly bill, none of the three options pays back within three years with the default staffing.
Methodology
Capacity: vCPUs in use × the headroom factor. All three options are sized to the same capacity.
VPS: Hetzner dedicated-vCPU (CCX) servers at Hetzner's listed prices, checked on October 5, 2026, excluding VAT, converted at the EUR to USD rate. Capacity is filled with 32-vCPU CCX53 servers, plus the smallest server that covers the rest. Each server includes some traffic; egress beyond that is charged per TB. Storage is priced for your data plus one backup copy. Cheaper shared-vCPU (CPX) plans are left out: the CPU is shared with other customers, so database performance is unpredictable.
Rented dedicated: used bare-metal servers from Hetzner's server auction, counted by threads. The default is an Intel i7-7700 with 64 GB at €65.70 a month, the most common auction price on October 5, 2026. These are older desktop-class CPUs without ECC memory, so you need many of them and good replication. No setup fee, and traffic is assumed to be included. Bulk data uses the same storage price as the VPS option.
Own servers: servers needed = capacity ÷ vCPUs per server, rounded up, bought upfront with network gear. Disks are assumed to be included in the server price. Monthly costs are rack space and power, one bandwidth port, and offsite backups with a small second site.
People: extra ops engineers × engineer cost per month. Migration is engineer-months × engineer cost, paid upfront. Your databases move with your servers, so in every option someone has to run them.
Comparison: payback = upfront cost ÷ monthly saving. Three-year total = upfront cost + 36 × monthly cost. The cloud bill is assumed flat.
Not included: hardware resale value, taxes, discounts you've negotiated, and price changes. Use this as a starting point for a deeper analysis.