When 37signals reported in late 2024 that they had saved over $2 million by leaving AWS, a wave of CTOs ran the numbers and quietly came to the same conclusion: for predictable, steady-state workloads, the public cloud has gotten expensive in ways that are hard to defend on a finance call. Two years later, repatriation is not a fringe move. It is a default consideration on any infrastructure review at a company past Series B with stable demand. The Three Cost Drivers Behind Repatriation The math has not really changed. The visibility of the math has. Egress Fees AWS charges roughly $0.09 per GB out to the internet beyond the first 100 GB. For a company moving 200 TB/month, that is over $18,000 monthly — for the privilege of letting your data leave. Hetzner charges zero. Cloudflare R2 charges zero. The egress tax is now the single most cited reason for moving. GPU Markups H100 instances on AWS list at roughly 3-4x the bare-metal cost amortized over depreciation.…