You can get a rough read on whether your cloud provider still suits you without buying anything or running a big project. It comes down to a few signals, and what each one is telling you. Sometimes the honest answer is that you are fine where you are, and that is worth knowing too.

Work through these five checks.

1. How much your workload has changed. You chose your provider for the company you were at the time. If your mix has shifted since, more GPU, far more data, steady load where it used to be spiky, the best-fit provider may have shifted with it. Start by noting what you really run now.

2. What the same setup would cost elsewhere. Take your main workloads and price them on another major provider, first at list rates, then with any credits or commitments applied. A large gap is worth investigating, while a small one usually means you are in a sensible place.

3. How much you are tied in by design. Something built deeply on one provider’s own managed services is costly to move, whatever the sticker price says. Where that is true, the comparison is most useful as leverage at renewal, which is real value on its own.

4. Whether you are near a decision moment. A provider decision is genuinely live at two points: when startup credits are about to expire, and when a commitment is up for renewal. Near one of those, the comparison is worth acting on. Away from them, treat it as information for later rather than a project for this week.

5. What a move would actually cost. The financial barriers to moving are falling, with egress fees waived for departing customers in 2024 and cloud switching charges banned across the EU from January 2027. What remains is engineering time: re-architecting, moving data, and testing. Weigh that one-off cost against the annual saving, and only move when the saving clears it comfortably.

Reading the result is straightforward. A meaningful cost gap, a portable workload, and a decision moment close by together make a proper look worthwhile. Take away any one of those and it is usually renewal leverage or a “you are fine for now.” Either way, you will know where you stand, which is more than most teams can say.