Cloud egress fees explained: what AWS, Azure and Google charge

Cloud egress fees are what a provider charges for data leaving its network: downloads, API responses, backups you pull out. AWS charges $0.09 per GB after the first 100 GB a month, so serving 5 TB costs $441 a month on AWS, $426 on Azure and $522 on Google Cloud. American Cloud doesn't charge egress fees.

You signed up for cloud hosting because the pricing looked simple. Compute by the hour, storage by the gigabyte, pay for what you use. Then the first real bill arrived and there was a line item you didn't plan for.

What are cloud egress fees?

Egress fees are what cloud providers charge you for data leaving their network. Every time a user downloads a file from your app, every time you send data to an outside service, every time you pull a backup to local storage, you're paying egress. Data coming in is usually free: Azure, for one, says inbound transfer is free and outbound is charged at the normal rate.

The rate looks small on paper. But it's per gigabyte, and a busy app moves terabytes. It's also hard to forecast. A traffic spike, a launch or a customer's large export all push the transfer line up.

Google Cloud also prices traffic between zones in the same region, so the meter runs inside the cloud as well as on the way out.

AWS data transfer out pricing compared with Azure and Google Cloud

Here's what the three biggest clouds charge for data transfer out to the internet from their US regions, at list price:

• AWS: the first 100 GB a month is free, counted across all your services and regions. Then $0.09 per GB for the next 10 TB, $0.085 for the next 40 TB, $0.07 for the next 100 TB and $0.05 above 150 TB.
• Azure: the same 100 GB free. Then $0.087 per GB for the next 10 TB, $0.083 for the next 40 TB and $0.07 for the next 100 TB, from North America or Europe.
• Google Cloud: on the default Premium Tier, traffic to North America is free for the first 1 GiB. Then $0.12 per GiB up to 1 TiB, $0.11 up to 10 TiB and $0.08 above that.

Run those rates against a few common amounts and you get this:

1 TB is counted as 1,000 GB, after each provider's free allowance. Google bills in GiB, so we converted.

At 5 TB a month, AWS egress alone is $5,292 a year, for moving data you already paid to store. To see the same numbers for ten clouds, including the developer clouds that bundle a transfer allowance with each server, read cloud providers with no egress fees.

What to do when your AWS data transfer bill is bigger than compute

Here's the order we'd work in when data transfer costs more than compute.

1. Find out what's sending the bytes. In your AWS bill, internet egress shows up under the DataTransfer-Out-Bytes usage type. Group it by service and resource. It's usually one or two things: a download bucket, an API serving media, a backup job someone else pulls from.
2. Cache what you can. If the same files go out again and again, a CDN serves repeats without hitting your origin. AWS includes 1 TB a month of free data transfer out of CloudFront.
3. Move the part that sends the bytes. If the bytes are your product (files people download, API responses, video), caching only trims the bill. The fix is a host that doesn't meter them. You don't have to move everything: put the egress-heavy service on American Cloud and keep the rest where it is.
4. Get the data out without paying for it. AWS waives data transfer out charges for eligible customers who move all their data off AWS, or all their data off one AWS service, through a request to AWS Support. Azure gives a credit for egress when you leave for another cloud. Under the EU Data Act, providers may charge only reduced switching charges until January 12, 2027, and none after that.

The exit is a one-time bill, and often a waived one. Egress is the bill you pay every month you stay.

If you're planning the whole move, we wrote a full guide on how to move your workloads off AWS.

Hosting an API or large files with no bandwidth charges

Free egress on a bucket only helps if your files live in a bucket. On American Cloud, outbound traffic from VMs, Kubernetes clusters and load balancers isn't metered either, so the API in front of the files costs the same at 1 TB out as at 20 TB.

Object storage is S3-compatible and works with s3cmd, rclone and the AWS CLI. It's $0.02 per GB a month, with a 250 GB ($5) monthly minimum, and no egress fees or API request charges, so a file downloaded a million times costs what it costs to store.

Take an API that stores 2 TB of files and serves 20 TB a month. On American Cloud, storage is $40 a month and transfer is $0. On AWS, the transfer alone is $1,742.70 a month, before you pay to store anything.

How to avoid egress fees

On a provider that meters egress, you can't avoid the fees. You can only send less data:

• Compress before transfer. Gzip or zstd on text, JSON and logs shrinks every response.
• Keep services that talk to each other together. Multi-region and multi-zone setups are good for availability and bad for transfer bills. Make sure the redundancy is worth what it costs.

Does American Cloud charge egress fees?

No. American Cloud charges no ingress or egress fees on cloud compute, Kubernetes, load balancing or object storage. We built it that way on purpose: your data is your data, and moving it shouldn't cost you. Add up the egress you stop paying, and American Cloud comes in at least 25% under AWS and Azure. You can check every rate on the pricing page.