This paper argues that many enterprises now face a “cloud hangover” after rushing to hyperscalers for agility, only to encounter runaway consumption costs, opaque billing, outages, and deep lock-in through proprietary platform services. It describes how consulting incentives accelerated all-in migrations, while hyperscalers later raised prices and added new charges, making exit costs feel existential. The paper explains how PaaS convenience bolts workloads to the platform and recommends replacing proprietary services with open, portable alternatives such as Kubernetes and S3-compatible storage to restore flexibility. It concludes that the goal is not abandoning cloud but regaining leverage with a governed hybrid approach: inventory workloads and costs, identify proprietary dependencies, re

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