The main engineering effort to reduce by that much was completed in 6 weeks according to their YouTube video.

7 months is presumably more like “the time it has been stable for” or so, although I am not sure the dates line up for that 100%.

Also cost reduction was apparently not the main impetus, GDPR compliance was.

That “main engineering effort” will go on forever. People neglect to note that everything is constantly changing. Just like the roof on your house, if you don’t upgrade your components regularly, eventually you will face a huge rewrite when that thing your ancient home-made infrastructure relies on is no longer supported or is no longer updated to support the latest thing you need for your SaaS.

You can’t avoid this cost. Some people refer to it as technical debt, but I think more accurately it could be called “infrastructure debt”. Platform providers maintain the infrastructure debt for you - this is what you pay them for. And they do it with tremendous economies of scale. Unless your scale is truly enormous - like Meta, for instance - it isn’t worth build your own infrastructure.

This is $7k/mo today. If they are actively growing, and their demand for compute is slated to grow 5x or even 10x in a year, they wanted to get off Heroku fast.

Would you say one person not working 100% of the time is also quite minor? ;)

Sure. We have around 10 of those. It’s a significant boon to the project for them to do nothing.