Free tier · comparisonUpdated 2026-06
Cloud egress free-tier allowances
Direct, apples-to-apples table of every always-free egress allowance. Oracle's 10 TB / month and Cloudflare R2's unlimited egress are the only allowances that meaningfully matter for serving production traffic. Hyperscaler 100-200 GB tiers are dev / test only.
All always-free egress allowances
| Provider | Free allowance | Duration | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cloudflare R2 | Unlimited egress | Always | All egress free. Storage $0.015/GB/month, Class A ops $4.50/M, Class B ops $0.36/M. |
| Oracle Cloud Infrastructure | 10 TB / month outbound | Always | Per-account, not per-region. After 10 TB, $0.0085/GB. By far the most generous always-free tier among hyperscalers. |
| AWS S3 / EC2 (Always Free) | 100 GB / month total outbound | Always | Aggregated across all regions and most services (S3, EC2, RDS, Lambda, API Gateway). Not stackable per-service. |
| AWS CloudFront (Always Free) | 1 TB egress + 10M HTTP/HTTPS requests / month | Always | Separate from the 100 GB EC2/S3 free tier. Counts only CloudFront edge serving. |
| AWS Free Tier (12-month) | 1 TB CloudFront / month + 15 GB S3 egress | First 12 months | Introductory free tier for new accounts only. Expires 12 months from account creation. |
| Azure (Free account) | 100 GB / month outbound | Always | Across all regions. Plus 12-month free tier of additional services for new accounts. |
| GCP Standard Tier networking | 200 GiB / month (Standard Tier only) | Always | Per account, all regions, from the Standard Tier rate table. Premium Tier (the default) includes only the first 1 GiB free. |
| GCP (Always Free) | 1 GB / month from Compute Engine + 100 GB / month from Cloud Storage | Always | Compute Engine: NA to worldwide ex China / Australia. Cloud Storage: NA egress, US regions (us-east1, us-west1, us-central1) only. Firestore adds 10 GiB / month. |
| Backblaze B2 | 3x average monthly storage | Always | Free egress up to 3x your average monthly storage volume; $0.01/GB beyond. Unlimited free via CDN and compute partners (Cloudflare, Fastly, bunny.net, CacheFly, CoreWeave, Equinix Metal, Vultr, phoenixNAP). |
| Wasabi | No metered egress, but cap rule applies | Always | Wasabi has flat-rate storage with egress capped at 1x stored data per month. Above that, fee applies. |
| DigitalOcean droplets | Bundled transfer with each droplet | Always | Each droplet includes 500 GB to 10 TB / month outbound depending on size. Excess $0.01/GB. |
| Hetzner Cloud | 20 TB / month per server (most plans) | Always | Generous bundled transfer. Excess €1/TB. Cheapest mainstream provider for high-egress workloads. |
Where the free tier is actually useful
For most production workloads, the hyperscaler 100 GB free tier is a rounding error - it covers maybe one developer's local download for testing. Where free tiers matter:
- Static site hosting: a small blog or marketing site can fit under 100 GB / month and run egress-free on any cloud.
- Internal tools: low-traffic admin dashboards, status pages, etc. usually fit in free tier.
- Oracle 10 TB: meaningful production allowance for a mid-size SaaS. Caveat: most apps that need 10 TB / month also need Oracle's other services to be cost-competitive, which they often are not.
- Cloudflare R2 unlimited: actually transformative. Storage cost is comparable to S3 ($0.015/GB vs $0.023/GB), and zero egress changes the math at any scale.
- Hetzner 20 TB / server: VPS-tier compute included, no per-GB bills. Best for cost-sensitive serving where you do not need hyperscaler services.
See also: Cloudflare R2 deep dive, Full provider comparison.