Cloud Egress Costs
Cloud providers’ data egress fees—what you pay to move data out of their networks—are widely seen as disproportionately high, often dwarfing underlying bandwidth costs and acting as a de facto lock‑in mechanism. Commenters compare hyperscalers’ pricing to much cheaper alternatives (smaller clouds, colo, CDNs like Cloudflare R2 or Bunny), argue that many workloads are cheaper on bare metal, and share war stories of surprise five‑figure bills. Others note that big providers do offer better global networks and negotiable discounts at scale, but expect growing regulatory and competitive pressure to push egress pricing closer to actual costs.
Pricing disparities and bill shock
- Commenters highlight massive gaps: big clouds (AWS, GCP, Azure) often around ~$90–110/TB list vs smaller providers at $1–10/TB or “free within quota.”
- Many say egress is their largest or one of the largest line items; several anecdotes of surprise 5‑figure bills (e.g., VPN or video traffic routed multiple times out of AWS).
- Some note confusion when pricing is expressed as “$/mo for 1TB” instead of “$/TB,” and how per‑month resets create burst penalties.
Egress as vendor lock‑in vs cost recovery
- One strong camp: egress is priced 10–100x over cost; primary purpose is lock‑in and to force third‑party SaaS to run in the same cloud (e.g., Snowflake, Datadog).
- Others argue there are real costs: global private backbones, many PoPs, peering ratios, SDN processing, redundancy, geography (e.g., Oceania, South America).
- Counterpoint: these arguments apply equally to ingress, yet ingress is free or cheap; critics say asymmetry is the lock‑in signal.
- Some mention Bandwidth Alliance and negotiated enterprise discounts as mitigating factors, but note list prices for small users remain “obscene.”
Cheaper providers and special offers
- Hetzner, OVH, Scaleway, Bunny, Backblaze, Wasabi, Oracle Cloud, Cloudflare R2 highlighted as low‑egress or “free‑within‑limits” options.
- Caveats: ToS‑based “reasonable use” (Cloudflare R2, some CDN tiers), eviction for extreme constant bandwidth (Hetzner cases), caps tied to storage size (Backblaze, Wasabi), or threat of throttling/cancellation if egress > stored data.
- CDNs differ on what can be cached (e.g., Cloudflare object size limits), affecting effective egress.
Cloud vs colo / bare metal economics
- Many claim colo or rented bare metal plus a fat pipe is dramatically cheaper than hyperscalers, sometimes cheaper than AWS egress alone.
- Others offer counter‑stories where colo migrations under‑delivered savings once staff time, over‑provisioning, and hardware depreciation were included.
- Several note a generational skills gap: many developers only know “cloud native,” don’t understand transit/peering, and assume $0.09/GB is normal.
Architectural and product implications
- Egress pricing shapes architecture: discourages multi‑cloud, encourages running SaaS inside the same cloud, and motivates BYOC models (data plane in customer VPC).
- Intra‑cloud charges (cross‑AZ, Direct Connect, interconnect) can also be significant and influence topology choices.
Exiting and regulation
- GCP now waives egress for full migrations off‑platform via an application process; commenters see this as pre‑empting regulation around “exit fees.”
- Some expect competition/antitrust regulators to scrutinize egress as an anti‑competitive barrier but note outcomes are still unclear.