How much is Oracle really costing you? Now you can find out in two minutes.
Most organisations know their Oracle support invoice off by heart. What they rarely have on hand is the number that actually matters to a CFO: the total cost of staying on Oracle for the next five years, versus the cost of moving to PostgreSQL — including the hardware refresh Oracle never mentions.
We built the Oracle to PostgreSQL Cost Calculator to close that gap. It's free, takes no personal data beyond an optional email for the PDF, and gives you a defensible number to bring to the board — not a sales pitch dressed up as analysis.
Oracle's standard annual support increases at 10% per year, compounding. An organisation paying $500,000 today is paying over $800,000 by Year 5 — for the same functionality, not more of it. Over five years that's $3.8M, not the $3M a flat-rate assumption would suggest. Most cost comparisons stop there.
Ours doesn't. Oracle hardware — Exadata, ODA, SPARC — is proprietary, and it comes up for a full refresh roughly every five years regardless of what you do about the database sitting on it. That refresh is coming whether you migrate or not. Moving to PostgreSQL means that spend goes to commodity server hardware instead, typically 25–50% cheaper than the Oracle equivalent. Leave that cost out of the comparison and you're not comparing Oracle to PostgreSQL — you're comparing Oracle licensing to nothing, which flatters neither number.
The calculator models all three legs: software support (with the 10% compounding built in), hardware refresh, and the migration project investment itself, front-loaded in Year 1. What comes out the other end is a 5-year TCO comparison, ROI percentage, and breakeven point.
Quick Estimate (~2 minutes) — enter your total annual Oracle software support cost and, if you have it, hardware support cost. No exact figures required; a considered guess is enough to get a directional answer. Pick your target PostgreSQL model, hit calculate, and you've got a 5-year comparison on screen.
Detailed Assessment (5–15 minutes) — the same model, built up product by product. Each Oracle product, licensing metric (Processor or Named User Plus), quantity and annual support cost, hardware items entered individually by purchase year, and your database counts split production versus non-production. This is the version that produces a report you can actually hand to a CFO or board without caveats.
Both paths end in a downloadable PDF: the 5-year projection, ROI, breakeven, and recommended next steps.
A few figures the calculator leans on that are worth having in your head going in:
None of this replaces a proper Pebble IT assessment — the calculator is deliberately built as a self-serve first pass, not a quote. But it's built on the same cost model we use in real engagements, not a marketing multiplier.
If you've got ten minutes and know roughly what you're paying Oracle, run the Detailed Assessment and get a report worth putting in front of your board. If you want the two-minute version first, start with the Quick Estimate. And if you'd rather just talk it through, book a no-obligation conversation with one of our database specialists — we'll tell you honestly whether PostgreSQL is the right call for your environment, and if it isn't, we'll say that too.
