Egress, the line item that almost nobody seems to budget for

Forgotten resources are the most common cause of cloud bill shock. But the one line item that can really get your blood pumping is most likely egress fees.

Does this rough estimate sound familiar to you?

Teams tend to estimate cloud costs exactly like this. And judging by how often it surfaces as a surprise afterwards, the most important factor rarely makes the estimate: what does it cost to move our data back and forth?¹ It’s often not when moving it IN but almost certainly when moving it OUT. Out to users, out to other regions, out to another provider, or back on-premises.

The Hyperscalers typically charge roughly $0.09 to $0.12 per GB for egress, depending on the provider and volume tier. Traffic between availability zones and regions carries its own charges on top of that. One comparison, and mind you – this is live pricing, prices 10 TB out at $926 on AWS, $895 on Azure and $1,149 on Google Cloud. The small free monthly allowances (100 GB at AWS, for example) barely dent numbers like these.

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Are egress fees justified?

Not by a long shot according to the best known public estimate.

Cloudflare, a company that competes with all three of the hyperscaler clouds, analysed the question for AWS in 2021. They used the wholesale transit prices that Cloudflare pays for bandwidth itself, and they deliberately rounded in AWS’s favour. The result was still an effective markup of roughly eighty times in North America and Europe.

The same analysis found that wholesale transit had become 93% cheaper over the preceding decade. AWS’s egress fees fell 25% in the same period. AWS was the named target here, but Azure’s fee sits within a few percent of AWS and Google slightly above. So the multiple is evidently an industry habit rather than one company’s. Treat the exact figures with the caution any competitor’s maths deserves. The gap remains wide enough that the fee cannot pass as simple cost recovery.

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Why egress is worse than any other cloud cost

Egress fees have two properties that make them worse than any other cost.

1. They scale with success
2. They can be used as an exit barrier

The first property is simple arithmetic. More users and more API calls mean more outbound gigabytes. The better your thing does, the larger this line item grows, often in a way the original budget never anticipated. The second property isn’t as simple but I’ll cover that further down.

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How to defend against runaway egress fees

To be honest, there is no complete way out of this. Not unless you think that limiting the success of your thing is a good idea, or unless you are really good at negotiating egress fees. There are, however, some ways to trim the bill:

1. Serve repeat content through a CDN or cache, so the origin pays for a gigabyte once instead of every time.
2. Compress what you send. Boring and effective but frequently forgotten.
3. Keep chatty components next to each other. Traffic between regions, zones or providers is metered too, and architecture decides how much of it exists.
4. Route heavy, predictable flows over private links where the per-GB rate is lower than the over-the-internet rate.

All of these tips help at the margin but none of them changes the shape of the curve. A fee that scales with usage will scale with success no matter how well you cache. That is why the two structural levers sit elsewhere: model your traffic before you commit, and pay attention to which meter you are signing up to in the first place.

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Egress is big business

That’s it for the budgeting side. The second property, the exit barrier, is a bigger and more complex story. This is where egress fees stop being a line item and instead becomes a business model.

How big business, you may ask? Honestly, nobody outside the hyperscalers knows. Data transfer does not appear as a revenue line of its own in any of their reports. To be fair, few providers report at that level of detail, ourselves included. Without the traffic volumes, no outsider can put a credible number on it. What we can do is to observe the behaviour, and the behaviour says plenty.

Three regulators, two continents

In the US, the Federal Trade Commission has been gathering information on cloud business practices since 2023. Their summary lists egress fees among the most frequently raised concerns when it comes to competition.

The UK’s competition authority concluded a two-year market investigation in July 2025 and found that egress fees are among the features that lock customers in. Mind you that this is in a market where AWS and Microsoft each hold 30 to 40% of UK cloud spend.

The European Commission opened market investigations in November 2025 into whether AWS and Azure should be deemed gatekeepers under the Digital Markets Act. Excessive fees and barriers to switching providers were among the practices flagged here too.²

For transparency: By March 2026, AWS and Microsoft had given the CMA voluntary commitments to reduce egress fees and improve interoperability in the UK.

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A toll on the boundary

Although it would be very easy to stop right here and call the case closed, there are a couple of arguments that we need to dissect first.

• Global networks genuinely cost billions to build.
• Nobody is forced to sign up, arguably.
• Discounts and CDN routes exist.

The most fair argument of them all ought to be that a provider is entitled to price its products as it sees fit.

Cost of moving bits or distance from the ecosystem?

Here is what moving a gigabyte typically costs at a hyperscaler, depending on where it is going:

• Within the same availability zone: free
• Between zones: around $0.01 per GB, in each direction
• Out through the provider’s own private links: around $0.02 per GB
• Out to the open internet: $0.09 per GB and up

Notice what the price is based on though. It is not based on the cost of moving bits, which the wholesale analysis above suggests is a fraction of a cent everywhere. It is based on the distance from the provider’s ecosystem. The further your data travels from their world, the more each gigabyte costs.

Gravity, not cost recovery

Now let’s combine that price structure with market concentration and see what happens.

As of early 2026, AWS accounts for roughly 28% of global cloud infrastructure spend, Microsoft for about 21% and Google for around 14%. Together they hold well over 60% of the market.³ This means that a very large share of the internet’s applications already live or communicate inside of three networks. In that world, a steep charge at the network boundary works less like cost recovery and more like gravity. Staying inside is free. Talking to the outside costs money. Every workload placed inside makes the next one likelier to follow, and so the moat digs itself.

There is one more argument in here, and it is the cleverest of them all so it deserves to be mentioned. It goes like this: since so much of the world’s digital infrastructure already sits inside of these three networks, the free and cheap inner tiers are simply good value. Most of whatever your apps need to talk to is already in there, so most of your traffic costs nothing. Sounds generous, right?

What the argument is actually doing is using the results of the gravity to justify the gravity. Being on the inside is only valuable because the boundary pricing contributed to pulling everyone in. And every new tenant who arrives, whether it’s because they want cheaper egress or other reasons, makes the inside a little more valuable and the boundary a little more expensive to cross for everyone else. That is not a discount but the moat, presented as a feature.

Can you afford to leave?

When leaving a provider means paying large sums to retrieve your own data, the fee shapes the decision of whether you can afford to leave at all. When the software company 37signals completed its well-known move off AWS, it negotiated a waiver for a quarter of a million dollars in egress fees. That waiver was newsworthy in itself. The largest providers have since formalised free egress for customers who leave entirely, partly under regulatory pressure. The offer covers a full exit though, not everyday operations.

Where this lands

We are talking about a cloud bill line item that is priced at an estimated eighty times the cost, is cheapest at the centre and steepest at the exit, and has drawn the attention of three regulators on two continents. To me, that reads as strategy rather than cost recovery. But here is the thing: you don’t have to pick a side in the debate to draw practical conclusions. The numbers tell the story on their own. Treat egress pricing as a strategic property of a provider, not as a technical fee.

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EU Data Act regulates egress

Lawmakers have gone further than the competition authorities. The EU Data Act has applied since 12 September 2025 and it will phase out egress charges in two steps. During the current transitional period, providers must limit switching charges to their directly incurred costs and disclose them in the contract up front. From 12 January 2027 the Act prohibits them outright, egress included. That deadline is already changing how European organisations negotiate contracts and that is a good thing. Note the scope, though: the ban covers charges for the switching process, not ordinary operational egress. The operational kind is where most of the monthly pain sits.

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How much does Cleura charge for egress?

Transparency is key so let’s look into it.

On the Cleura Cloud price list, outbound transfer for Cleura Public Cloud costs €0.02875 per GB. This puts the outbound transfer of 10 TB from Cleura Public Cloud at around €288, roughly a third of the hyperscaler rates.

Networks, peering and people cost money, and we price for a sustainable business like anyone else. I still want to point out and defend an important structural difference. Our rate is flat, comparatively cheaper, and we apply the same price per gigabyte whether the data goes to your users, to another provider or back on-premises. It is not designed to keep you here. So, judge us by the same test as the other providers: not whether a fee exists, but what the fee is designed to do.

Free egress in Cleura Compliant Cloud

In Cleura Compliant Cloud, outbound data transfer costs €0, and inbound is free on both.

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Additional reading

• The anatomy of cloud bill shock, the companion piece on everything else that surprises people when it comes to cloud bills.
• Cleura Cloud pricing and cost calculators
• AWS EC2 On-Demand pricing, Azure bandwidth pricing and Google Cloud network pricing, the primary sources for the per-GB rates above.
• Regulation (EU) 2023/2854, the Data Act, the full legal text behind the switching-charge phase-out.

Sources

1. Competition and Markets Authority, Cloud services market investigation, Appendix O: customer views on egress fees (2025). Ofcom’s and the CMA’s evidence records that customers tend to forecast year on year, and the CMA’s commissioned qualitative research (Jigsaw, 2024) found that egress fees contribute to the difficulty of predicting overall cloud spend. The CMA notes it received limited evidence on egress predictability specifically. Appendix O (PDF). ↩︎
2. European Commission, market investigations on cloud computing services under the Digital Markets Act, 18 November 2025: Commission decision C(2025) 7948; coverage by CIO Dive. ↩︎
3. Synergy Research Group, Q1 2026 cloud infrastructure market data, as charted by Statista and reported by Computer Weekly, April 2026. ↩︎

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