The egress tax,
priced openly.
An independent reference for cloud data transfer pricing. The same 10 TB of outbound data costs $0 on Cloudflare R2 and $1,137 on GCP Premium Tier. Every figure here links back to the official source.
[01]Cloud Egress Cost Calculator
tier-aware · multi-providerEnter monthly volume to see exact costs across all major providers. Switch tabs for per-provider detail, or use Compare All for a side-by-side view. Pricing verified against official documentation as of 2026-06.
$913/mo with zero-egress storage
Cloudflare R2 and Backblaze B2 charge $0 for egress. See comparison
Pick your workload. We'll tell you which cloud to use.
Egress pricing is one number; egress cost depends on your workload shape. We map six common shapes to real provider pricing and rank cheapest first.
- 1Cloudflare R2$0.00/mo
- 2Backblaze B2$512/mo
- 3Microsoft Azure$4,282/mo
- 4Amazon Web Services$4,395/mo
- 5Google Cloud$4,413/mo
- →Use a CDN (Cloudflare, Fastly, CloudFront) — their cache hit rate often beats raw cloud egress by 60-80%.
- →Backblaze B2 + Cloudflare Bandwidth Alliance = $0 egress to Cloudflare CDN — the cheapest stack for video at scale.
- →Most video bytes leave to the internet; inter-AZ and inter-region are negligible. Optimise the internet egress path first.
Definition
Egress is the data leaving your cloud.
Ingress is free. Egress is not. The asymmetry is deliberate: it funds global backbone capacity, but also creates economic lock-in. The larger your dataset, the more it costs to leave. A company with 100 TB on S3 pays roughly $8,000 just in egress fees to migrate that data elsewhere.
For most production workloads, egress is one of the fastest-growing line items on the cloud bill, and one of the most optimisable. 12 strategies can cut it 40-80%.
JSON responses, GraphQL payloads, REST traffic served to your users.
Images, video, audio, and static assets pulled from object storage by clients or CDNs.
Database snapshots, log archives, and DR replicas streaming out of the region.
Logs, metrics, and traces shipped to Datadog, Splunk, New Relic, or self-hosted SIEMs.
Cross-region or cross-cloud copies for disaster recovery, analytics, or HA architectures.
Container images and build artifacts pulled by developer machines and CI workers worldwide.
[02]Cost ladder by volume
The same monthly transfer, costed across providers. Notice how the gap between cheapest and most expensive grows with volume, not shrinks.
Internet egress, US region, after 100 GB free tier (hyperscalers). Spread = max gap between any two providers.
[03]The complete reference
24 guides · 1 calculatorEvery guide is a single-page reference, not a blog post. No vendor pitch, no fluff, every figure linked to source.
Egress Calculator
Multi-provider tier-aware calculator with hidden cost toggles
read 01 →Provider Comparison
Side-by-side pricing for 8+ providers with interactive volume slider
read 02 →AWS Data Transfer
Complete AWS egress reference: S3, EC2, CloudFront, Direct Connect
read 03 →CloudFront Pricing 2026
Per-region tier pricing for every CloudFront edge region, with request fees
read 04 →CloudFront vs S3 Breakeven
Tier-by-tier math: when CloudFront beats direct S3 egress
read 05 →Azure Bandwidth
Zone pricing, ExpressRoute, and the cheapest hyperscaler at scale
read 06 →Azure Bandwidth Zones
Zone 1/2/3 mapping with per-region rate tables
read 07 →GCP Premium vs Standard
The unique tier choice that makes GCP Standard cheaper than AWS
read 08 →GCP Cloud CDN Pricing
Cache egress, fill, lookup, and invalidation costs
read 09 →Cloudflare Zero Egress
R2, Workers, Pages: the complete zero-egress ecosystem
read 10 →Hidden Egress Costs
NAT Gateway, cross-AZ, API Gateway, VPC endpoints, and load balancer fees
read 11 →NAT Gateway Tax
The $0.045/GB processing fee that can exceed your egress charges
read 12 →12 Reduction Strategies
Ranked tactics with savings estimates and implementation difficulty
read 13 →AWS to GCP Transfer
Bidirectional transfer math for multi-cloud architectures
read 14 →AWS to Azure Transfer
Transfer math for the most common enterprise cloud pair
read 14b →Multi-Cloud Replication
Ongoing egress for hot replicas across 2 or 3 clouds
read 15 →ML Training Data Egress
Common Crawl, HuggingFace, ImageNet pull costs per cloud
read 16 →LLM Inference Egress
Per-token bandwidth math for self-hosted LLM APIs
read 17 →Video Streaming Egress
Per-viewer-hour cost from 480p to 4K across providers
read 18 →1 TB / month Scenario
Every provider compared for small-SaaS volume
read 19 →100 TB / month Scenario
Media platform scale; the $8.5k spread between providers
read 20 →1 PB / month Scenario
Enterprise scale with EDP / EA negotiation context
read 21 →Free Tier Comparison
Every always-free egress allowance side by side
read 22 →37signals Cloud Exit
Documented egress costs from a public cloud-exit case
read 23 →Cost Explorer Filters
Find egress in AWS, GCP, Azure billing dashboards
read 24 →[04]What changed in 2026
Egress pricing is moving, slowly. Three forces are reshaping the market: regulation, IPv4 scarcity, and the zero-egress movement.
Free migration egress
AWS, Azure, and GCP now offer free egress when customers leave the platform under specific conditions tied to the EU Data Act. Read the fine print, the conditions are narrower than the headlines suggest.
$43.80 / IP / year
AWS charges $0.005/hour for each public IPv4 address. IPv6 eliminates this cost and removes the need for NAT Gateways entirely. For workloads that can use it, this is one of the largest available wins.
R2, B2, Wasabi mature
Cloudflare R2 has shipped lifecycle policies and event notifications. Backblaze B2 is free via the Cloudflare Bandwidth Alliance. The pressure on hyperscaler egress margins is increasing every quarter.
Adjacent cost references
Other cost calculators in the network
[05]Frequently asked
Sourced from real PAA queries and engineer Slack questions. Each answer is the short version, expand for the long one.
Q.01How much does cloud egress cost?
›
Cloud egress costs vary significantly by provider. AWS charges $0.09 per GB for the first 10TB per month of internet egress. Azure charges $0.087 per GB for the first 10TB. GCP charges $0.12 per GB at the Premium Tier. Cloudflare R2 charges $0.00 for egress, making it the cheapest option for data-transfer-heavy workloads. The first 100GB per month is free on AWS and Azure; GCP Premium Tier includes only the first 1 GiB free. Oracle Cloud offers a generous 10TB per month free tier.
Q.02Which cloud provider has the cheapest egress?
›
Cloudflare R2 has zero egress fees, making it the cheapest for egress-heavy workloads. Among the hyperscalers, Azure is slightly cheaper at entry level ($0.087/GB vs AWS at $0.09/GB vs GCP at $0.12/GB). Above 50TB per month, Azure and AWS rates are identical ($0.07/GB, then $0.05/GB above 150TB). Oracle Cloud offers 10TB per month free egress with rates of just $0.0085/GB after that. Hetzner and DigitalOcean also offer significantly cheaper egress than the major hyperscalers.
Q.03What is the difference between egress and ingress?
›
Ingress is data flowing into a cloud provider (uploads, API requests inbound), which is free on all major providers. Egress is data flowing out of a cloud provider (downloads, API responses, serving web content), which incurs per-GB charges. This asymmetry is a deliberate pricing strategy that creates economic lock-in. Once your data is in a cloud, moving it out costs money. The larger your dataset, the more expensive it becomes to migrate away.
Q.04How can I reduce cloud egress costs?
›
The most effective strategies include using a CDN like CloudFront or Cloudflare to cache content at edge locations, enabling VPC Gateway Endpoints for S3 and DynamoDB traffic which is free, migrating egress-heavy storage to Cloudflare R2 for zero egress fees, compressing data with gzip or brotli before transfer to reduce volume by 30 to 70 percent, and avoiding unnecessary cross-region data transfer. For high-volume workloads, negotiating committed use discounts or using Direct Connect can also reduce costs significantly.
Q.05What are hidden cloud egress costs?
›
Hidden egress costs include NAT Gateway processing fees at $0.045 per GB on AWS, cross-AZ data transfer at $0.01 per GB each way, API Gateway data transfer charges, load balancer data processing fees at $0.008 per GB, and VPC endpoint hourly charges. These fees often exceed the base egress charges themselves. A 10TB per month workload routing through NAT Gateway adds $450 per month in processing fees alone, on top of the standard egress charges.
Q.06Why are cloud egress fees so high?
›
Cloud egress fees are deliberately high as a pricing strategy to create switching costs and economic lock-in. Cloud providers make ingress free to encourage data uploads, then charge significant per-GB fees for data leaving their network. This funds their global network infrastructure but also makes it expensive to move workloads between providers or back on-premises. The EU has investigated egress fees as a potential anti-competitive practice, and some providers like Cloudflare have positioned zero egress as a competitive advantage.
Sources verified 2026-06