David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH)

I remembered how much we used to spend on infrastructure before the cloud.

And I saw numbers I could not recognize in proportion to what we needed.

The fact that computers have gotten so much faster over time shouldn't

things be getting cheaper?

Why are we spending more and more money servicing more customers?

Yes, but with much faster computers, Moore's law should be lowering the cost.

And the opposite is happening.

Why is that happening?

And that started a journey of unwinding why the cloud isn't as great as the deal as people like to think that.

We were using AWS for everything.

Hey.com launched as an entirely cloud app.

It was completely on AWS for compute, for databases, for all of it.

We're using all the systems as they're best prescribed that we should.

Our total cloud bill for...

Basecamp, our total spend with AWS was I think 3.2 million or 3.4 million at its peak.

That's kind of a lot of money.

3.4 million.

I mean, we have a ton of users and customers, but still, that just struck me as unreasonable.

And the reason why it was so unreasonable was because I had the pitch for the cloud ringing in my ears.

Hey, this is going to be faster.