TCO calculator
What your cloud warehouse would cost in your own data center
Most TCO calculators are sales brochures with sliders: you see a result but not where it came from. Here every parameter is in the open, carries its source and can be changed. If an assumption strikes you as too generous, turn it down and watch what happens.
The figure you already know. Everything else is derived from it — traceably, through the assumptions below.
In your own data center
- Hardware, spread over its service life
- €42,000
- Power, including cooling and losses
- €9,745
- Storage, network, redundancy, backup
- €15,524
- Operations
- €22,950
- lavalake subscription
- €8,988
- Total
- €99,207per year
derived server count: 6 · operations effort: 0.3
Saving against today
82 %
€440,793 per year
Hardware pays for itself in
6 months
Your result is above what these cases show. That is possible — credit billing costs more than ordinary cloud infrastructure — but it should make you recalculate rather than nod along. Turn the uplift and the operations effort up and see what remains.
The assumptions, sourced one by one
Two values come from a documented case: 37signals disclosed its cloud exit with actual invoices — $3.2M of cloud spend a year, $1.3M remaining afterwards, $700,000 for 20 servers, a service life of “five, maybe even seven years”, and explicitly no additional staff. That yields the cloud spend replaced per server and the purchase price. Power price, PUE and labour cost are official or industry-body figures. The uplift is an estimate and labelled as one.
Put your result in context
Two published figures for comparison. Both concern cloud infrastructure in general rather than a data warehouse specifically — and a credit-billed warehouse sits at the expensive end of that spectrum. That is why the model often lands above the band.
50–67 %
saving if on-premises costs “one-third to one-half” of the cloud
a16z, Sarah Wang und Martin Casado, „The Cost of Cloud, a Trillion Dollar Paradox“, 27. Mai 2021
55 %
reached at 37signals, by their own figures: $3.2M before, $1.3M remaining plus hardware over five years
37signals, „Our cloud-exit savings will now top ten million over five years“, 17. Oktober 2024
What this calculation does not include
- The migration itself: effort for transfer, reconciliation and parallel operation
- Double cost during parallel operation, while both systems run
- Floor space and connectivity if you have no data center of your own
- Failover capacity beyond the derived server count
- Your team learning Trino, Iceberg and the operational side
- Your commitments with the current vendor while the term runs
Sources
- 137signals, „Our cloud-exit savings will now top ten million over five years“, 17. Oktober 2024
- 2Uptime Institute, Global Data Center Survey 2025 – gewichteter Mittelwert der Jahres-PUE
- 3BDEW-Strompreisanalyse 2026, Mittelwert für kleine und mittlere Industriebetriebe
- 4Statistisches Bundesamt, Arbeitskosten je geleistete Stunde 2025 (Produzierendes Gewerbe und Dienstleistungen)
- 5a16z, Sarah Wang und Martin Casado, „The Cost of Cloud, a Trillion Dollar Paradox“, 27. Mai 2021
With your figures rather than ours
Bring your cloud bill. We will run the model against your case — and tell you if it does not pay off.
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