Scenario · 1 TB / monthUpdated 2026-06
1 TB / month egress: every provider compared
1 TB / month is the typical small SaaS / early-stage startup outbound volume. At this level the free-tier nets matter most: Cloudflare R2 and Oracle Cloud serve it for $0; AWS and Azure free tiers cover the first 100 GB (GCP Premium covers just 1 GiB); the remainder is billed at the highest tier rate.
Monthly cost: 1 TB outbound
| Provider | Free allowance | Billable GB | Rate / GB | Monthly cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cloudflare R2 | All egress free | 0 | $0.000 | $0.00 |
| Backblaze B2 + CF | Free via Bandwidth Alliance | 0 | $0.000 | $0.00 |
| Oracle Cloud | 10 TB / month | 0 | $0.0085 | $0.00 |
| AWS CloudFront | 1 TB / month (always free) | 0 | $0.085 | $0.00 |
| AWS direct (S3 / EC2) | 100 GB | 924 | $0.09 | $83.16 |
| Azure (Zone 1) | 100 GB | 924 | $0.087 | $80.39 |
| GCP (Premium Tier) | 1 GiB | 1,023 | $0.12 | $122.76 |
| GCP (Standard Tier) | 200 GiB | 824 | $0.085 | $70.04 |
| DigitalOcean | Bundled with droplet | Excess | $0.01 | ~$0.00 |
| Hetzner Cloud | 20 TB included with most servers | 0 | $1/TB | ~$0.00 |
Sources verified 2026-06. DigitalOcean and Hetzner include large bundled egress with their compute; the practical bill for 1 TB / month is near zero.
At 1 TB / month, choose for ergonomics not cost
The hyperscaler bill at 1 TB / month is $70 to $123. The cheapest options (R2, B2, DigitalOcean, Hetzner) save ~$80-120 / month. For a startup, this is a useful but not transformative saving. The bigger decision factors:
- Will you stay at 1 TB / month, or grow 10x in 12 months? At 10 TB the gap is $1k versus $0.
- Does your stack require AWS-specific services (Lambda, DynamoDB, Cognito)? Lock-in dominates over $80 savings.
- Is your origin already on a hyperscaler? Adding R2 as a CDN front fixes the egress problem without migrating.
- Does your use case touch user-uploads (where R2 zero-egress shines) or low-RPS API responses (where any provider works)?
See also: 100 TB / month scenario, Free-tier comparison.