Colocation for NYC Fintechs. When Your AWS Bill Becomes a Business Problem.
You moved to cloud because it was easy. Now your infrastructure costs are growing faster than your revenue and your CFO is asking questions you don’t have great answers to. There’s a better architecture — and we’ll show you the math for free.
Metro Colo Advisory works with NYC fintech companies — payments, trading technology, lending platforms, data and analytics, and financial infrastructure — to model the cloud versus colocation economics for their specific situation and find the right infrastructure path forward.
- Cloud vs Colo Analysis, Free
- NYC Fintech Specialist
- No AWS Bill Too Large To Analyze
- Free to Fintech Clients
The Moment Every Scaling Fintech Faces
There is a moment in the growth of almost every fintech company when the infrastructure decision that made perfect sense at founding stops making sense at scale. At 10 employees and $50,000 per month in revenue — AWS was the right call. No upfront capital. No infrastructure expertise required. Pay for what you use. Scale up instantly. The flexibility was worth the premium.
At 150 employees and $8 million per month in revenue — the math looks completely different. Your workloads have stabilized. Your compute requirements are predictable. You are running the same infrastructure 24 hours a day 7 days a week at consistent utilization.
You are paying cloud rates — with their built-in margin, their egress fees, their reserved instance complexity —for infrastructure that behaves exactly like dedicated hardware would.
The flexibility premium you are paying made sense when you needed flexibility. You no longer need flexibility. You need efficiency.
This is the inflection point. And it is the point where companies that run the numbers honestly almost always find that dedicated colocation infrastructure is dramatically cheaper than the cloud architecture they have been running.
What The Numbers Actually Look Like — Run For A Typical NYC Fintech
The cloud versus colocation analysis is not complicated. But most fintech CTOs have never actually run it for their specific situation. Here is what it looks like for a representative NYC fintech at Series B scale.
Scenario — 120-Person NYC Payments Fintech Currently on AWS:
Current AWS Setup:
Monthly AWS bill: $95,000 — $96,500
Equivalent NYC Colocation Setup:
Power requirement: approximately 35kW at current NYC rates Monthly colo bill: $7,200 — $8,500 Hardware amortized over 5 years: $6,500 per month estimated Total monthly infrastructure cost: $13,700 — $15,000 Annual spend: $164,400 — $180,000
Annual Savings:
$960,000 — $975,000 3-Year Savings: $2,880,000 — $2,925,000 5-Year Savings: $4,800,000 — $4,875,000
Note: This example uses stable core workloads only. Elastic development, testing, and burst capacity workloads remain on cloud in a hybrid model. Actual numbers depend on your specific workload profile.
The Companies That Already Did This: Dropbox moved 500 petabytes from AWS to custom infrastructure and saved $74 million over two years. 37signals moved off cloud entirely and cut their annual infrastructure bill from $3.2 million to under $1 million. GEICO is repatriating workloads from Azure projecting 50% cost reduction per compute core.
These are not hyperscalers. They are companies that ran the math honestly and made a rational infrastructure decision.
Want to see these numbers for your specific
AWS or Azure spend?
Our free cloud versus colo analysis takes your actual monthly bill and shows you exactly what equivalent NYC colocation would cost — with realistic savings projections over 1, 3, and 5 years.
Is Cloud Repatriation Right For Your Company Right Now — The Honest Assessment
Not every fintech should move off cloud. The economics only work for specific workloadprofiles at specific stages of growth.
Here is how to think about it honestly.
Strong candidates for repatriation:
- Your monthly AWS or Azure bill consistently exceeds $30,000 to $50,000 Your core workloads — payment processing, transaction databases, core API infrastructure — run 24/7 at consistent predictable utilization
- Your egress fees are growing faster than your overall infrastructure spend
- Your CFO or board has raised infrastructure costs as a concern in the last 12 months
- You have raised a Series A or beyond and have the operational maturity to manage colocation infrastructure
- Your data has compliance or residency requirements that cloud distributed infrastructure complicates
Better suited to stay on cloud for now:
- Your monthly infrastructure spend is under $20,000
- You are pre-Series A and your workloads change dramatically month to month
- Your traffic spikes unpredictably by 10x or more — genuinely elastic demand
- Your engineering team has no infrastructure operations experience and you cannot hire it
- You are still iterating rapidly on your core architecture and need maximum flexibility
The hybrid answer for most fintechs:
- The right answer for most scaling fintechs is not all-in on colo or all-in on cloud. It is a deliberate hybrid — core stable workloads on dedicated infrastructure where the economics favor it, elastic and development workloads remaining on cloud where flexibility justifies the cost.
- A well-designed hybrid architecture for a Series B fintech typically reduces total infrastructure spend by 40 to 60% while maintaining the cloud flexibility the business still needs for variable workloads.
We help fintech clients design this architecture, model the economics, and execute the infrastructure transition
— starting with a free analysis of your current spend.
Compliance Requirements For NYC Fintechs — What Your Infrastructure Needs To Support
Fintech companies operating in New York face a compliance environment that is increasingly demanding — and increasingly focused on infrastructure security.
PCI-DSS For Payment Processing:
Any fintech handling cardholder data — payment processors, card issuers, payment facilitators — must comply with PCI-DSS. Colocation in a PCI-certified facility simplifies your compliance posture significantly. You are inheriting physical security controls that have already been audited rather than building and documenting them from scratch. Every facility Metro Colo Advisory recommends for payment-focused fintechs holds current PCI-DSS certification.
SOC 2 For Institutional and Enterprise Clients:
If your fintech sells to banks, asset managers, insurance companies, or large enterprises — SOC 2 Type II certification for your infrastructure is increasingly a contractual requirement not just a nice-to-have. Enterprise procurement teams and information security reviewers ask for SOC 2 reports as part of vendor onboarding. Colocation in a SOC 2 Type II certified facility gives you documentation that satisfies these requirements immediately.
FINRA and SEC For Trading Adjacent Businesses:
Fintechs building trading technology, order management systems, market data platforms, or execution infrastructure face FINRA and SEC oversight that extends to their technology infrastructure. The compliance documentation requirements for these businesses align closely with what the financial services colocation facilities — particularly Equinix NY4 — already have in place.
NY DFS For New York Licensed Entities:
Fintechs holding New York State money transmitter licenses or other DFS-regulated licenses face cybersecurity requirements under 23 NYCRR 500 — the DFS Cybersecurity Regulation. This regulation includes specific requirements for access controls, encryption, audit trails, and incident response that quality colocation facilities support directly.
For Trading-Adjacent Fintechs — Latency Is A Product Feature
Not every fintech cares about latency to financial markets. A lending platform or insurance technology company can run from any well-connected facility without meaningful competitive disadvantage.
But for fintechs building in and around financial markets — order management, execution, market data, algorithmic strategy tools, risk systems — the physical proximity to financial market infrastructure is a genuine competitive advantage that cloud computing cannot replicate.
Equinix NY4 in Secaucus is the center of US financial market infrastructure. Every major exchange, every significant market data provider, every prime broker has infrastructure there.
A fintech that colocates at NY4 or maintains a direct cross-connect to it operates on the same physical network as the market itself.
The latency difference between a fintech running on AWS us-east-1 and a fintech colocating at Equinix NY4 is measured in milliseconds — sometimes in microseconds for the most latency-sensitive applications. For a fintech whose product performance depends on execution speed that difference is not a technical detail. It is a product specification.
If your fintech touches financial market data or execution in any meaningful way — the NY4 ecosystem conversation is worth having before you make any infrastructure decision.
What These Conversations Look Like — Fintech Situations
We Navigate Regularly
Scenario 1
Series B Payments
Fintech Watching AWS Bill Explode A 90-person payments infrastructure company has grown from $15,000 per month on AWS at Series A to $110,000 per month two years later. Their CTO has been meaning to evaluate alternatives but has been heads-down building product. Their new CFO has put infrastructure costs on the board agenda. They need an honest analysis of what moving stable workloads to colo would save — and whether the operational complexity is worth it.
Our Approach
We run the cloud versus colo financial model for their specific workload profile. We identify which workloads are strong repatriation candidates and which should stay on cloud. We present a phased migration plan that moves the highest-spend stable workloads first — capturing most of the savings with manageable operational disruption. We find 2 to 3 NYC facilities that fit their requirements and negotiate competitive terms.
Scenario 2
Trading Technology
Fintech Evaluating NY4 A 40-person fintech building algorithmic execution tools for institutional clients is currently running on AWS us-east-1. Their clients have started asking about latency to major exchanges. Their CTO knows they need to be in the financial ecosystem but has never navigated a colocation evaluation.
Our Approach
We run a latency analysis confirming the performance gap between their current AWS setup and dedicated infrastructure at Equinix NY4. We model the cost of NY4 infrastructure versus their current AWS spend. We manage the Equinix evaluation and negotiation — Equinix’s sales team is professional and experienced at maximizing what you pay — and we make sure our client has market benchmark data on their side at every stage of the negotiation.
Scenario 3
Pre-Profitability
Fintech Exploring Options Early A 30-person Series A lending platform is currently spending $22,000 per month on AWS. Their CTO has read about cloud repatriation and wants to understand if and when it makes sense for their company.
Our Approach
We run the honest analysis and tell them clearly — at $22,000 per month their current spend does not yet justify the operational complexity of a colocation move. We give them the specific spend threshold where the math changes for their workload profile — likely $40,000 to $50,000 per month. We stay in contact and revisit the conversation when they approach that threshold. No pressure. No false urgency. Just honest advice.
What Our First Conversation Looks Like — The Five Questions That Shape Every Recommendation
What is your current monthly AWS or Azure spend and how has it trended over the last 12 months?
The starting point for any cloud repatriation analysis. The trend matters as much as the current number — a bill growing 20% per quarter has a very different 3-year projection than one that has stabilized.
Which of your workloads are stable and predictable versus elastic and variable?
The repatriation economics only work for stable predictable workloads. We need to understand which portion of your AWS bill represents infrastructure that runs consistently — and which represents genuine elastic capacity that benefits from cloud’s pay-per-use model.
Does your product touch financial market data or execution in any way?
If yes — the NY4 ecosystem conversation becomes relevant. Latency to financial markets may be a product requirement not just an infrastructure preference.
What compliance frameworks apply to your business?
PCI-DSS for payment processing. SOC 2 for enterprise clients. FINRA or SEC for trading adjacent businesses. NY DFS for licensed entities. The compliance picture shapes the facility shortlist immediately.
What is your engineering team's infrastructure operations experience?
Colocation requires more operational involvement than cloud. Someone on your team — or a managed services partner — needs to own the physical infrastructure relationship. We need to understand your team’s capacity before recommending a migration approach.
Why NYC Fintechs Use Metro Colo Advisory
Fintech infrastructure decisions are complicated by the intersection of rapid growth, compliance requirements, latency considerations, and the genuine operational complexity of moving off cloud. Most infrastructure advisors can handle one of these dimensions. Very few handle all of them together.
Metro Colo Advisory was built for exactly this complexity. We understand the cloud repatriation economics for fintech workload profiles. We know which NYC facilities serve trading-adjacent businesses and which serve payment and lending platforms.
We know the compliance certifications that enterprise fintech clients require. And we know how to structure a phased migration that captures the savings without disrupting the business.
Our analysis is free. Our recommendations are honest — including when staying on cloud is the right answer. And our commission comes from the provider you choose — so our only incentive is getting the infrastructure decision right for your specific situation.
Ready To Find Out What You Should Actually Be Paying For Infrastructure?
Tell us your current cloud spend and workload profile. We’ll come back within 72 hours with a realistic analysis of what equivalent NYC colocation would cost — and whether the numbers make repatriation worth pursuing right now.
If the numbers make sense we help you make the move. If they don’t we tell you that clearly — because honest advice is more valuable than a closed deal.
No cost. No obligation. If repatriation isn’t right for your situation right now we’ll tell you exactly when it will be.
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