13 teams that moved to AWS
13 teams moved to AWS. Many left GitHub Actions (3) or Mailchimp (2). The typical team cut 88% of its bill. Each team's old bill, running cost and net saving.
This page is about teams that moved onto AWS, the reverse of the AWS vendor page, where every story is an exit. Here, AWS is the cheaper option, usually because a team took over infrastructure that a more specialised vendor had been running for it.
The biggest moves are CI and email. SODA, NullAlpha and DevOpsNess left GitHub's hosted runners for their own runners on EC2 or EKS. SODA went from about $800 a day to about $100, and NullAlpha from about $14,200 a month to about $2,700. TargetBay, which sends email at high volume for e-commerce customers, moved from SendGrid to Amazon SES, from about $20,000 a month to about $2,000. Smaller senders such as Wes Bos, Legendsverse and EvPick did the same with newsletters, cutting bills under $210 a month to a few dollars.
AWS is not always much cheaper here. iRonin.IT moved a client's Rails app off Heroku to EC2, ElastiCache and RDS in 2017 and still pays about $6,600 a month against about $10,800, a 39% cut. Sri Laguduva's in-house MongoDB on AWS kept 42% of the Compose bill. DataSpoc is the other extreme: it moved from Snowflake to DuckDB on S3 storage it already paid for. Every story gives a running cost, and the page saves about $73,000 a month net.
Written from these stories, updated Nov 2026. Numbers as each team reported them. How this ledger works
- Website
- aws.amazon.com
What they left for AWS
Left GitHub Actions3 teams · median $11.5K/mo saved · cut 70%–88% of the bill
| Team and what they built | Since | Old bill | Running cost | Net saved | Bill cut |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SODASelf-hosted EC2 runners with RunsOn · AWS SODA moved CI from GitHub-hosted runners to self-hosted EC2 runners with RunsOn, taking the cost from about $800 a day to about $100. | Jul 2025 | $24K/mo | $3,000/mo | $21K/mo | 88% |
| NullAlphaAutoscaling self-hosted runners on Kubernetes · AWS The NullAlpha team moved CI from GitHub-hosted runners, about $14,200 a month, to a Karpenter-scaled self-hosted fleet on Kubernetes at about $2,700. | Oct 2026 | $14.2K/mo | $2,700/mo | $11.5K/mo | 81% |
| DevOpsNessSelf-hosted runners on EKS Spot · AWS · GitHub The DevOpsNess team moved most CI from GitHub-hosted runners to self-hosted runners on EKS Spot instances. macOS jobs stayed on GitHub-hosted runners, which they say still cost about $800 a month. | Apr 2026 | $3,420/mo | $1,010/mo | $2,410/mo | 70% |
Left Mailchimp2 teams · median $106/mo saved · cut 96%–99% of the bill
| Team and what they built | Since | Old bill | Running cost | Net saved | Bill cut |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Wes BosSendy on Amazon SES · AWS Wes Bos left Mailchimp, about $2,500 a year for the list, for a $65 Sendy licence on Amazon SES, and put the saving at $2,400 a year. | Jul 2015 | $208/mo | $8/mo | $200/mo | 96% |
| EvPickSelf-hosted MailCheap on Amazon SES · AWS Julien Renaux moved the EvPick newsletter from Mailchimp to a self-hosted copy of MailCheap on Amazon SES, so the subscriber list sits in his own database. He built it with Claude Code in a few hours. | Nov 2026 | $13/mo | $0/mo | $13/mo | 99% |
Left SendGrid1 team · $18K/mo saved · cut 90% of the bill
Left Snowflake1 team · $7,988/mo saved · cut 100% of the bill
Left Compose1 team · $5,800/mo saved · cut 58% of the bill
| Team and what they built | Since | Old bill | Running cost | Net saved | Bill cut |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sri LaguduvaIn-house MongoDB · AWS Sri Laguduva moved an unnamed employer off Compose, a managed MongoDB service, onto in-house MongoDB. Compose ran slightly above $10,000 a month and the in-house setup about $4,200. | May 2018 | $10K/mo | $4,200/mo | $5,800/mo | 58% |
Left Heroku1 team · $4,208/mo saved · cut 39% of the bill
| Team and what they built | Since | Old bill | Running cost | Net saved | Bill cut |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| iRonin.IT client (real-estate app)Self-managed AWS EC2 and RDS · AWS iRonin.IT moved a client's Rails app from Heroku dynos, Heroku Postgres and a Redis add-on to EC2, ElastiCache and RDS on AWS. The running cost shown is the AWS setup the agency reports actually running; it also projected a smaller setup later, which isn't counted here. | May 2017 | $10.8K/mo | $6,561/mo | $4,208/mo | 39% |
Left Periscope Data1 team · $1,450/mo saved · cut 73% of the bill
| Team and what they built | Since | Old bill | Running cost | Net saved | Bill cut |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bold.orgClickHouse and managed Grafana · ClickHouse · AWS Bold.org replaced Periscope Data, now part of Sisense, with ClickHouse and managed Grafana on AWS, taking a $2,000/mo bill down to about $550/mo. | Nov 2025 | $2,000/mo | $550/mo | $1,450/mo | 73% |
Left CircleCI1 team · $499/mo saved · cut 87% of the bill
Left Kit1 team · $197/mo saved · cut 99% of the bill
| Team and what they built | Since | Old bill | Running cost | Net saved | Bill cut |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| LegendsverseOwn BYOMailer on Amazon SES · AWS Alejandro Medina of Legendsverse saw their Kit bill reach almost $200 a month. They moved their newsletters to Amazon SES with their own tool, BYOMailer, and put the cost at about $3. | May 2026 | $200/mo | $3/mo | $197/mo | 99% |
Left Resend1 team · $85/mo saved · cut 94% of the bill
| Team and what they built | Since | Old bill | Running cost | Net saved | Bill cut |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sandipan KunduOwn email delivery on AWS SES · AWS Sandipan Kundu replaced Resend with a self-built delivery system on AWS SES, taking the bill from about $90 a month to about $5. | Oct 2026 | $90/mo | $5/mo | $85/mo | 94% |