Egress — the fee to move data out of a cloud to the internet — is the line item that turns a small storage bill into a shocking one. Here is why it costs what it does, and how to pay less.
Figures below are list prices as of June 2026 and are estimates — verify on each provider’s pricing page.
How much egress actually costs
| Provider | Internet egress $/GB | Free allowance |
|---|---|---|
| Cloudflare R2 | $0.00 | n/a (always free) |
| Wasabi | $0.00 (fair use) | n/a |
| Backblaze B2 | $0.00 up to 3x stored, then ~$0.01 | 3x stored data |
| Azure | ~$0.087 | 100 GB/mo |
| AWS | ~$0.09 | 100 GB/mo |
| Google Cloud | ~$0.12 | 1 GB/mo |
The bandwidth itself costs providers a tiny fraction of these prices at their scale. So why the markup?
Data gravity: egress as a switching cost
The honest answer is lock-in. Ingress is free because providers want your data on their platform. Once it is there, a per-GB egress fee makes moving it — or running a multi-cloud architecture that shuffles data between providers — expensive. The more data you accumulate, the more it “weighs,” and the harder it is to leave. That is data gravity, and egress pricing is one of its main mechanisms.
What regulators did
EU rules (the Data Act) and competition scrutiny pushed the hyperscalers to waive egress fees when a customer fully leaves the provider. AWS, Google Cloud and Azure now offer this exit-egress waiver. But it only applies when you migrate away entirely — your normal, day-to-day egress for serving users is still billed at the rates above.
How to cut your egress bill
- Put a CDN in front of your origin. Cloudflare, Fastly and bunny.net partner with Backblaze B2 for free egress through the CDN.
- Use free-egress object storage. Cloudflare R2 charges $0 to serve data out — see R2 vs S3.
- Keep traffic in-region. Cross-region and inter-AZ transfer are billed separately and add up fast.
- Cache aggressively so you serve the same object from the edge instead of re-fetching from origin.
Estimate your own bill
Plug your monthly GB out into the egress calculator to see the difference across providers, and read how to estimate your AWS data-transfer bill for a step-by-step. See the full egress price comparison for all ten providers. All figures are estimates — confirm on the vendor pages.