Egress fees

Egress fees are the charges cloud providers bill for data leaving their network: out to the internet, to another region, or to another provider. Inbound transfer is free everywhere; outbound typically costs $0.05 to $0.12 per GB at list price, billed per gigabyte, every month.

In plain terms

Think of it as free delivery in, paid postage out. Serving 10 TB of video or file downloads a month from AWS costs roughly $900 in transfer alone, before any compute or storage. On the bill it appears as Data Transfer Out (AWS), bandwidth (Azure), or network egress (Google Cloud). Each provider includes a small free allowance (around 100 GB a month), and a CDN usually serves the same traffic at a lower per-GB rate.

Why it matters when you migrate

• It’s the line item that surprises people. Compute and storage are easy to estimate; traffic is not, and egress is a top cause of cloud bill shock. Put a real number on it before you migrate.
• It’s the quiet lock-in. Moving 200 TB out to a competitor costs five figures at list price, which is exactly why providers price it this way. Factor exit cost into provider choice, not just entry cost.
• It shapes architecture. Chatty services split across regions, or a database in one cloud queried from another, pay egress on every call. Keep tightly coupled systems in the same region.