Cloud Egress Costs Explained
The average company spends thousands per month on cloud data transfer fees and most teams have no idea how much they are paying. AWS, Azure, and GCP each use different pricing tiers, free allowances, and hidden surcharges that make comparison nearly impossible.
EgressCost.com is the independent resource for understanding cloud egress pricing. We break down every tier, every hidden fee, and every optimization strategy so you can stop overpaying for data transfer. All pricing is verified against official documentation and updated monthly.
Cloud Egress Cost Calculator
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Cloudflare R2 and Backblaze B2 charge $0 for egress. See comparison
What Is Cloud Egress?
Cloud egress refers to data leaving a cloud provider's network and traveling to the internet, another cloud, or an on-premises data center. Every byte that exits AWS, Azure, or GCP incurs a transfer charge, and these charges vary significantly based on the volume of data, the source service, the destination, and the cloud region involved.
The asymmetry is deliberate: cloud providers charge nothing for data coming in (ingress) but charge significant per-GB fees for data going out (egress). This creates economic lock-in, since once your data is in a cloud, moving it out costs money. The larger your dataset, the more expensive it becomes to leave.
For many organizations, egress costs are the fastest-growing line item on their cloud bill. A SaaS application serving 50TB/month from AWS pays roughly $4,300/month in egress alone. That is $51,600/year just to deliver data to your own users.
Common egress scenarios
- Serving web content, APIs, or media files to users over the internet
- Replicating data between AWS regions for disaster recovery
- Sending logs and metrics to third-party monitoring tools (Datadog, Splunk)
- Database backups transferred to on-premises storage
- CDN origin pulls from S3 or Blob Storage buckets
- Cross-cloud data movement in multi-cloud architectures
- CI/CD artifact distribution to developer machines worldwide
Egress Cost Guides
Deep dives into every aspect of cloud data transfer pricing, hidden fees, and cost reduction strategies.
Hidden Egress Costs
NAT Gateway fees, cross-AZ transfer, and the charges nobody warns you about
Reduce Egress Costs
10 proven strategies to cut your data transfer bill by up to 80%
NAT Gateway Deep Dive
The $0.045/GB tax that can exceed your actual egress charges
Multi-Cloud Egress
Cross-cloud transfer costs and strategies to minimize them
Enterprise Negotiation
AWS EDP, Azure MACC, GCP CUDs, and private interconnect pricing
Provider Comparison
Side-by-side pricing at 1TB, 10TB, 50TB, and 100TB per month
Provider Comparison at a Glance
How the major providers stack up for standard internet egress from US regions. All figures represent the starting per-GB rate before volume discounts apply.
| Provider | Starting Rate | Free Tier | Best For |
|---|---|---|---|
| AWS | $0.09/GB | 100 GB/mo | High-volume workloads (aggressive tier discounts) |
| Azure | $0.087/GB | 100 GB/mo | Enterprise workloads (lowest rate at 50TB+ scale) |
| GCP | $0.12/GB | 100 GB/mo | Latency-sensitive (Premium Tier uses Google backbone) |
| Cloudflare R2 | $0.00/GB | Unlimited | Egress-heavy storage (S3-compatible, zero transfer fees) |
Prices verified from official documentation. See full comparison with interactive calculator
Related Resources
Frequently Asked Questions
How much does cloud egress cost?
AWS charges $0.09/GB for the first 10TB/month. Azure charges $0.087/GB. GCP charges $0.12/GB. The first 100GB/month is free on AWS and Azure. Cloudflare R2 charges $0.00 for egress. Actual costs depend on volume, region, and destination.
Which cloud provider has the cheapest egress?
Cloudflare R2 has zero egress fees. Among the big three, Azure is slightly cheaper at the entry tier ($0.087/GB vs AWS $0.09/GB vs GCP $0.12/GB). At higher volumes (50TB+), Azure drops to $0.04/GB. Oracle Cloud offers 10TB/month free egress.
How can I reduce cloud egress costs?
Use a CDN like CloudFront or Cloudflare to cache content at edge locations. Use VPC Gateway Endpoints for S3/DynamoDB traffic (free). Consider Cloudflare R2 for egress-heavy storage. Compress data with gzip/brotli before transfer. Avoid unnecessary cross-region data transfer.
What are hidden cloud egress costs?
NAT Gateway fees ($0.045/GB on AWS), cross-AZ transfer ($0.01/GB each way), API Gateway data transfer charges, load balancer data processing fees, and VPC endpoint hourly charges. These often exceed the egress charges themselves.
Is egress free between cloud regions?
No. Cross-region transfer costs $0.01-$0.02/GB on AWS, similar on Azure and GCP. Only same-availability-zone traffic is free on AWS. Google offers free egress between zones in the same region. Planning architecture to minimize cross-region transfer is critical.
All pricing data sourced from official cloud provider documentation. Prices verified from AWS, Azure, GCP, and Cloudflare pricing pages. Last updated March 2026.