What is Egress Fees?
Also known as: Data Transfer Out
A per-gigabyte charge imposed by cloud providers on network traffic that leaves their data center, availability zone, or internet boundary.
Egress fees are data transfer costs incurred when traffic flows out of a cloud provider's network to the public internet, a different cloud provider, or, in some cases, to another region within the same provider. The fee is typically metered per gigabyte and can account for a significant portion of a cloud bill for data-intensive workloads such as content delivery, video streaming, backup replication, or multi-cloud architectures.
Each major provider structures its egress pricing differently. AWS charges for data transfer out to the internet starting at $0.09/GB for the first 10 TB per month, with tiered discounts up to 150 TB. Azure and GCP have similar per-GB rates, though GCP offers free egress to the same destination within certain limits for specific services (e.g., Cloud CDN). Internal egress between availability zones within the same region is also billed, though at a lower rate, usually $0.01/GB. Most providers do not charge for ingress (incoming data).
Egress fees create an economic lock-in effect: moving large volumes of data out of a provider becomes expensive, discouraging migration to competitors or hybrid architectures. Some providers have responded by eliminating egress fees for customers who fully leave their platform (e.g., Google's free transfer out program), but standard rates remain a major source of revenue and a key factor in cloud cost optimization strategies.
Key facts
- AWS charges $0.09/GB for the first 10 TB of data transfer out to the internet per month.
- Azure and GCP apply egress fees at similar rates, roughly $0.08-0.12/GB for the first tier.
- Data transfer between availability zones in the same region is typically charged at $0.01/GB.
- Most cloud providers do not charge for data ingress (traffic entering the network).
- Egress fees are a primary driver of vendor lock-in for large data workloads.
How it works in practice
Related terms
References
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