The rough math goes like this: We spent $3.2m on cloud in 2022. Just under a million of that was on storing 8 petabytes of files in S3, fully replicated across several regions. So that leaves ~$2.3m on everything else: app servers, cache servers, database servers, search servers, the works. That’s the part of the budget we intend to bring to zero in 2023. Then we’ll worry about exiting the 8PB from S3 in 2024.

David spoke at length on this decision when he was on Ship It! late last year.