Networking & Delivery
Egress Fees
Charges for data leaving a provider's network, a major and often surprising cost on hyperscaler clouds.
Egress fees are what you pay for data leaving a provider's network, and they're the classic hidden cost of cloud hosting. Getting data in is usually free. Getting it back out, to your users, to another cloud, to your own office, meters up fast on AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure, often around 8 to 12 cents per gigabyte after a small free allowance. At scale that becomes a serious number.
The strategy exists partly to discourage you from leaving, which is why egress is central to vendor lock-in. Moving a large dataset off a hyperscaler can cost real money in transfer alone. It's also why some providers make a point of not charging it: Wasabi and Backblaze B2 built their object storage on free or cheap egress, and Cloudflare's R2 dropped egress fees entirely.
The practical defenses are a CDN in front to cut origin egress, keeping data transfer inside one provider's network, and reading the transfer pricing before you commit. A cheap-looking compute bill can hide an expensive egress one.
Go deeper
- Bandwidth and Egress Fees: The Bill Nobody Reads Until It HurtsCompute prices converged; data-transfer prices didn't. How egress actually gets billed, where the traps are, and how the providers in our catalog compare.