Migrating from Oracle to PostgreSQL: how much you save per year (with numbers)
The Oracle bill does not shrink on its own. Someone has to decide to stop paying it.
Oracle Enterprise Edition runs around USD $47,500 per core, plus 22% annual support that you pay whether you ever place a call or not. PostgreSQL does practically the same thing for most transactional workloads and charges no license. The question is not whether you save, it is how much and what it costs to get there.
01 The license that never comes back
Every Oracle Enterprise core you switch off removes ~USD $47,500 in upfront license. That expense simply stops existing on PostgreSQL.
~USD $47,500 per core
02 The 22% a year that keeps stacking up
Oracle support is 22% of the license value every year, indefinitely. On a mid-sized deployment that is tens of thousands of dollars renewing on autopilot.
22% annual support
03 The migration is a one-time expense
You trade a recurring cost for a single investment. From year two on, almost everything you stop paying is net savings.
04 Not everything migrates equally easily
PL/SQL, partitions, and specific jobs take work. Most of it converts; a minority gets redesigned. Best to measure that before, not after.
// A typical case (illustrative)
Picture a company running Oracle Enterprise across 8 cores. The upfront license, near USD $380,000, is already amortized, but annual support of ~USD $84,000 comes due every year. Moving to PostgreSQL makes that license support disappear. Even after netting out a one-time migration, year two already operates with six figures less in recurring spend.
Illustrative example with typical market figures, not a specific client.
// next step
Ask for an assessment that measures what percentage of your Oracle migrates directly and what needs a redesign. At dba.mx we deliver it at a fixed price with a firm cap, so you know the total cost before you begin.