Cloud Migration Cost Analysis: A 7-Step Framework for the Real Cost of Leaving a Managed Platform (and 12 Tools That Help)

Moving from managed platforms such as Heroku, Render, Vercel, Fly.io, or Platform.sh to a public cloud can reduce raw infrastructure costs, but the article argues that a reliable business case must include direct infrastructure, platform engineering labor, idle non-production environments, and amortized migration expenses. It proposes a seven-step assessment process based on current invoices, environment usage, equivalent cloud architectures, staffing costs, applicable commitment discounts, migration risks, and pre-cutover cost controls such as tagging, budgets, and auto-stop policies. For pre-migration planning, it recommends free provider tools including AWS Migration Evaluator and Pricing Calculator, Azure Migrate, and Google Cloud Migration Center, while suggesting Cloudamize, Flexera One, or CloudHealth for large VM- or licensing-heavy estates; after migration, native cloud cost tools, CloudZero, nOps, and Kubecost/OpenCost can allocate and optimize actual spending. A small worked example finds that equivalent cloud infrastructure may cost two to three times less than a managed platform, but savings can disappear when an organization must dedicate significant engineering capacity to operations. The article emphasizes fully loaded cost per environment rather than per-instance pricing, notes that always-on staging and development environments are a major source of waste, and positions Qovery as an operational layer that can deploy into customer-owned cloud accounts, manage Kubernetes-related tasks, and automatically stop non-production environments, rather than as a migration cost-modeling tool.

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