I manage one midsized company's set of cloud resources that I'm pretty sure could be reduced by 40% in cost or more if they were willing to take a 3 year advanced reserve. The problem is I can't get a handle on how much their infrastructure will or won't need to scale in the next three years, since they themselves don't know. There's always some new deal around the corner that would require scaling up. On top of that, I'm not sure what we have now will even be sufficient for the existing size of the business a year from now, as much depends on new features in the pipeline and how they end up being used. The result is they end up overspending by probably $3k a year, but the upshot is the flexibility. As far as getting completely off the cloud, I migrated them away from dedicated boxes years ago and I don't miss dealing with maintaining those. The extra time for that alone was worth at least $3k a year. Even with a smaller dedicated data center, there are still issues with getting tickets responded to promptly. And there's way less in the way of failover unless you build it yourself.