More and more mid-sized companies are asking the same question: what would it actually cost to reduce dependency on US cloud services? The honest answer: considerably less than most expect — if the project is scoped correctly. In this article we break down where the costs come from and where the typical mistakes are made.
Why the question comes up right now
Three developments are driving the topic:
- The CLOUD Act and legal uncertainty. US authorities can access data held by US providers — even when the servers are located in Frankfurt. For companies handling sensitive customer or health data, this is a compliance risk that must be documented.
- Rising licence costs. SaaS subscription prices have been climbing reliably for years. A company with 100 employees easily pays €30,000–80,000 per year for a typical US SaaS stack — and the trend points upward.
- Mature open-source alternatives. Nextcloud, Keycloak, Metabase, n8n, and GitLab are no longer hobbyist tools — they run in production at government agencies and large enterprises.
The three cost blocks of a cloud exit
1. Inventory and prioritisation
Before anything is migrated, you need clarity: which services are in use? Where does personal data live? What dependencies exist between systems?
This analysis is the cheapest and at the same time most important part of the project. As a structured assessment with risk evaluation and a migration roadmap, it typically costs €3,000–8,000 — and prevents the most expensive mistake: trying to migrate everything at once.
2. Migrating the prioritised systems
The actual migration works best in stages. A proven starting point is a system with high value and manageable risk — often business intelligence, file collaboration, or workflow automation.
Realistic effort per system, production-ready with monitoring, backups, and SSL:
| System | Example | Effort |
|---|---|---|
| BI / analytics | Metabase instead of Looker/Tableau Cloud | 2–4 weeks |
| File collaboration | Nextcloud instead of Microsoft 365 / Google Workspace | 3–6 weeks |
| Workflow automation | n8n instead of Zapier/Make | 1–3 weeks |
| Identity management | Keycloak instead of Auth0/Okta | 2–4 weeks |
Depending on data volume and integrations, a single system usually lands between €10,000 and €25,000 — quotable as a fixed-price project.
3. Operations after handover
This is where market offerings differ the most. Many providers build their business on ongoing operations contracts — which replaces one dependency with another. Our approach: build and document systems so that your team operates them after a structured handover. Operating costs then shrink to hosting (often €100–500 per month with an EU provider or in your own data centre) plus occasional updates.
What really decides the math: licence savings
A practical example: a company pays €4,000 per month for US SaaS licences that can be replaced by self-hosted alternatives. That is €48,000 per year. A €20,000 migration pays for itself in five months — after that the company saves permanently, owns its data, and is audit-ready.
The math flips, however, when migration happens without prioritisation: systems with low value, high integration effort, or no mature alternative (highly specialised industry SaaS, for instance) belong at the end of the list — or deliberately stay where they are.
The three most common mistakes
- Big bang instead of stages. Migrating everything at once risks outages and blows up any budget. Staged migration delivers a usable result after every phase.
- Ignoring operations. A migration without documentation, monitoring, and knowledge transfer produces a system nobody can maintain. Handover to your own team has to be part of the project plan from day one.
- Compliance as an afterthought. Migrating without cleanly documenting the GDPR assessment gives away the project's biggest benefit: provable audit-readiness.
Conclusion: measure first, migrate second
A cloud exit is not a mammoth project when it is scoped properly: assessment, prioritised stages, structured handover. The total cost of a typical first step — assessment plus migration of one system — usually stays below €30,000 for a mid-sized company, with savings accruing from the first day after go-live.
The sensible entry point is an honest inventory. That is exactly what we built the Sovereignty Check for: within one to two weeks you receive a complete inventory of your cloud stack, a CLOUD Act and GDPR risk assessment per system, and a prioritised migration roadmap with effort estimates — at a fixed price.