Many projects still rely on AWS S3, Google Cloud, or IPFS for user data storage. As the Walrus mainnet approaches, developers are starting to consider a practical question—Is switching to Walrus really worth it? Will the code need major changes?

In fact, migration is not as complicated as it seems, but the prerequisite is to understand why you want to move.

**Three Factors Driving Migration**

Cost is the most straightforward. Walrus aims for a pricing below $0.005/GB/month, while AWS S3 standard tier is around $0.023/GB, making the cost difference obvious. Besides price, decentralized storage can avoid single-point censorship risks and is more friendly for global content distribution. If your dApp is already running on Sui chain, using Walrus can enable seamless collaboration between computation and storage—an integrated experience that traditional cloud solutions can't offer.

Of course, migration doesn't come for free. You need to first assess your data volume, access patterns, and whether your team’s technical foundation can quickly adapt to the new solution.

**Let the Data Speak**

Take a social dApp scenario as an example: adding 10TB of user-uploaded content (images and videos mixed) per month. Currently using AWS S3.

Roughly calculated, Walrus's monthly storage cost is about $50, while S3 costs around $230. This is just for storage, excluding bandwidth. Annually, just on storage alone, you could save over $3,300. The larger the data volume, the more you save—if your average monthly traffic is also high, the savings become even more significant.

**Migration Can Be Gradual**

There's no need to do a complete overhaul all at once. Most projects can adopt a phased approach—first move some data to test the waters, then gradually scale up after gaining experience. This reduces risk and gives the team time to learn and debug.