Egress fees explained: what AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and others charge to read your data (2026)

Egress fees are what a cloud charges you to send data out of it, and they’re the line on a storage bill that surprises people. Storing 20 TB in Amazon S3 runs about $470 a month. Reading that same 20 TB back out to the internet once costs about $1,780 more. The data sitting still is cheap. Using it is what costs money.

Below is what the big three clouds and the cheaper storage providers charge to read data out, how to estimate your own bill, and how to keep it down. Prices are list prices from each provider’s own pricing page or price API, checked on October 16, 2026.

What counts as egress

Egress is data leaving the provider’s network: a user downloading a file, a server in another data center reading from your bucket, a restore to your office. Ingress, uploading data in, is free nearly everywhere. Traffic between services in the same region is usually free too, which is exactly why clouds want your compute and your storage in the same place.

Per-request fees are a separate line. Every GET and PUT costs a fraction of a cent on AWS, Azure and Google, which only matters when you have millions of small objects.

Why clouds charge for it

Moving data does cost something. Every provider pays for transit and network gear, us included. But per-GB egress pricing does a second job, and it’s the bigger one: it makes leaving expensive. The more data you keep in one cloud, the more it costs to take it anywhere else, and the more every new workload lands next to it. That lock-in is what the EU went after with the Data Act, covered below.

So treat egress as a design input, not a rounding error. Where your data sits decides where your compute has to run.

The big three

Sources: Amazon S3 pricing and the AWS price list API; Microsoft’s retail prices API and Azure bandwidth pricing; Cloud Storage pricing. Azure is a little cheaper again if you set routing preference to “Internet” instead of Microsoft’s network.

For most people the whole bill sits in the first tier. Moving 5 TB a month out of S3 costs about $450, whether it’s 5 TB of video or 5 TB of model checkpoints.

Providers that don’t charge (much) for egress

A second group of providers prices storage higher or lower than the big three but takes egress off the table, or nearly. Each has a rule that matters:

Sources: R2, B2, Wasabi, DigitalOcean, Akamai, Vultr, Hetzner.

Read the fine print with your read pattern in mind. A backup archive you rarely touch fits almost any of these. A dataset you read five times a month is exactly the case the ratio rules were written to catch.

A worked example: reading 20 TB a month

Say you keep 20 TB of training data or media and send all of it out once a month, to GPUs at another provider or to your users. Egress alone, at list price:

• Amazon S3: about $1,780 (100 GB free, 10 TB at $0.09, the rest at $0.085).
• Azure Blob: about $1,730 on Microsoft’s network routing.
• Google Cloud Storage: about $2,340.
• Cloudflare R2: $0, plus request fees.
• Backblaze B2: $0, because 20 TB out is within 3x of 20 TB stored.
• Wasabi: $0, but you’re right at the edge of its fair-use line.

Read it three times a month and the big-cloud numbers triple, while the ratio-based providers start to bite. This is why AI teams in particular get burned. A training job reads the full dataset every epoch, and the storage bill doesn’t show it until the invoice arrives.

Leaving a cloud: the exit waivers

All three big clouds now waive egress if you’re moving out, with conditions. AWS wants you to request it through support, move all your data off AWS (or off one service), and finish within 180 days. It pays the waiver back as credits. Google requires you to stop using the service and terminate the agreement, with an exit notice before you start. Neither covers moving part of your data while keeping the rest.

In the EU, the Data Act goes further. From January 12, 2027, providers can’t charge switching fees, data egress included, when a customer moves to another provider. That covers switching, not everyday traffic.

How to cut your egress bill

• Put compute next to storage. Most egress comes from reading data somewhere else. Same building, no egress.
• Cache what users download. A CDN in front of a bucket turns many reads into one.
• Compress before you store. Logs and text shrink a lot, and smaller objects mean fewer gigabytes out.
• Price your read pattern, not your storage. Multiply how much you store by how many times a month you read it, and compare on that number.

How bandwidth works at GigeNET

We don’t bill per gigabyte inside your plan. Our dedicated servers include a monthly transfer allowance (30 TB on the standard builds on our browse servers page) or an unmetered port, and past a metered allowance it’s $0.02 per GB. Our S3-compatible object storage works the same way: reads inside your plan cost nothing extra.

The bigger win is location. Put the storage and the servers that read it in the same data center, in Ashburn, Chicago or Los Angeles, and the reads that would have been egress never leave the building. That’s the idea behind our AI data storage.

FAQ

What are egress fees?

Charges for data leaving a provider’s network, usually billed per GB. Uploading data in (ingress) is almost always free.

How much does AWS charge for egress?

For S3 in us-east-1, the first 100 GB a month is free across AWS, then $0.09 per GB for the first 10 TB, with lower rates after that. Check the current price list before you budget.

Does AWS waive egress fees?

Only if you’re moving off AWS: you request it through support, move all your data off AWS or one service, and finish within 180 days.

Which cloud storage has no egress fees?

Cloudflare R2 charges none. Backblaze B2 and Wasabi are free within a ratio of what you store. Several smaller providers include a transfer allowance and then bill about a cent per GB.