Cloud Egress Cost Calculator

Enter how many gigabytes your service sends out to the internet in a month and the table shows what that transfer costs on AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and Cloudflare R2. Each provider's monthly free allowance comes off first, and the remainder is priced through the published volume tiers. The highlighted row is the cheapest provider at the volume you entered. Ingress is free on all four, so only outbound traffic matters here.

How the internet learned to bill for bandwidth

Charging for data movement is older than the cloud. When commercial internet service providers began selling transit in the 1990s, they priced capacity rather than volume: a customer bought a pipe of a given size and paid on the 95th-percentile method, in which the provider samples throughput every five minutes across the month, discards the busiest five percent of the readings, and bills against what is left. That let a customer burst occasionally without penalty while the provider still charged for the sustained load it had to carry. The billing unit was bits per second, not gigabytes, and the price fell year after year. William B. Norton, co-founder and chief technical liaison of the interconnection company Equinix from 1998 to 2008 and the analyst behind the DrPeering research, documented transit prices falling by an average of about thirty percent a year from the late 1990s onward as capacity outran demand.

Cloud storage reframed the same charge as volume. When Amazon launched S3 on 14 March 2006, it billed fifteen cents per gigabyte-month to store data and twenty cents per gigabyte to move it, in either direction. Pricing by the gigabyte transferred rather than by the size of the pipe was the model that stuck, and every major cloud copied it. Ingress, the data flowing in, lost its meter over the following years because providers want data to arrive and stay: Amazon waived inbound charges as a promotion from December 2009 and made inbound transfer free across every AWS service on 1 July 2011; the rest of the industry settled on the same asymmetry. Outbound traffic kept its meter, and "egress" became the ordinary word for the gigabytes a workload sends back out to the internet. Rates have fallen across the two decades since, but the structure this calculator prices — a free allowance, then per-gigabyte tiers charged on outbound traffic alone — is a direct descendant of that 2006 rate sheet.

How egress charges are calculated

All four providers bill outbound traffic the same way: a free monthly allowance, then cumulative volume tiers, each with its own per-gigabyte rate.

billable = max(0, GB − free)

The billable volume fills the tiers in order. The first block of gigabytes is charged at the first tier's rate, the next block at the second tier's rate, and so on — crossing a tier boundary never reprices the gigabytes below it. This is the same marginal structure as income tax brackets, and it means the effective rate per GB falls slowly as volume grows rather than dropping in steps. Providers tier the rate downward because their own cost of delivery per gigabyte drops with scale, as heavier traffic fills existing peering and transit more fully, so the discount is passed on at the margin rather than retroactively. To find your own blended rate, divide the total bill by the gigabytes sent. Measured across billable volume alone it always sits between the first tier's rate and the rate of the deepest tier you reached; put the free gigabytes back in the denominator and it falls lower still, steeply so at volumes only just past the allowance.

Current internet egress rates

The rates below are the providers' published on-demand prices for data transfer from cloud services to the internet, US regions, verified July 24, 2026. Tier boundaries apply to billable volume, after the free allowance.

Regional variance is real: egress from Asia-Pacific or South American regions typically costs more than the US rates shown, sometimes half again as much. The comparison here is apples-to-apples for US-hosted workloads.

Three volumes, worked through

A side project pushing 500 GB. On AWS, 100 GB is free, so 400 GB bill at $0.09 for $36.00. Azure's identical allowance leaves 400 GB at $0.087, or $34.80. Google Cloud premium tier has no allowance: 500 × $0.12 = $60.00. R2 is $0.00. At this scale the absolute differences are small, but GCP is already 72% more expensive than Azure.

A startup at 5,000 GB. AWS bills 4,900 GB, all inside its first tier: $441.00. Azure bills the same 4,900 GB at $0.087 for $426.30. GCP crosses into its second tier: 1,024 GB at $0.12 is $122.88, plus 3,976 GB at $0.11 is $437.36, totaling $560.24. R2 stays at zero. The bill is now the size of an engineer's laptop every month, and it recurs.

A scale-up at 15,000 GB. AWS bills 14,900 GB: 10,240 at $0.09 is $921.60, then 4,660 at $0.085 is $396.10, for $1,317.70. Azure runs the same split at its lower rates: $890.88 plus $386.78, or $1,277.66. GCP walks three tiers — $122.88, then 9,216 GB at $0.11 for $1,013.76, then 4,760 GB at $0.08 for $380.80 — totaling $1,517.44. R2 would still charge nothing for the transfer itself, which at this volume is a five-figure annual difference.

What this calculator leaves out

The scope is internet egress only. Traffic between regions of the same cloud, and between availability zones inside a region, sits on entirely separate rate cards with different numbers — usually cheaper per GB but easy to accumulate in chatty architectures. Those transfers are out of scope here; if replication or cross-region reads dominate your bill, this comparison will understate your costs.

CDN egress is also separate. CloudFront, Cloud CDN and Azure Front Door each publish their own price sheets, with their own regional bands and free allowances where offered, and fronting a workload with a CDN often changes the economics more than switching clouds does.

Two provider-specific notes. Google's figures here are premium tier, the default network path over Google's backbone; standard tier routes over the public internet and is markedly cheaper where it is available. Google's always-free tier grants a token gigabyte of monthly egress on premium tier, too small to move any figure here, so the comparison treats premium tier as having no allowance. And R2's zero applies to egress specifically — storage is billed per gigabyte-month and read and write operations are metered separately, so R2 is free to read from, not free to run.

Why egress is the surprise line item

Egress is the classic surprise bill because it scales with success. Storage and compute grow when you provision them; egress grows when users show up. A product launch, a popular file, or one customer running a nightly export can multiply the line item without anyone changing infrastructure. The asymmetry is deliberate: data goes in free and comes out at a price, which makes leaving — or even mirroring data elsewhere — an expensive decision. Regulators noticed. The EU Data Act, Regulation (EU) 2023/2854, put switching charges on a phase-out schedule. Article 29 allows only reduced charges, capped at the costs a provider actually incurs, during a transition that began on 11 January 2024, and prohibits switching charges entirely from 12 January 2027; the regulation's own definition of a switching charge takes in the data egress costs of the move, and the Act became applicable on 12 September 2025. Ahead of that deadline the three large platforms moved in quick succession in early 2024: Google Cloud dropped network transfer fees for departing customers in January, AWS waived data transfer out for customers moving off the platform on 5 March, and Microsoft matched for Azure on 13 March. Each waiver is a one-time arrangement granted on request, not a standing discount. Cloudflare had already built R2's pitch on the same pain point when it introduced the service in September 2021: by charging for storage and operations instead of transfer, it made egress-heavy workloads — media delivery, model weights, public datasets — cheap to serve. For everything still running day to day inside a big cloud, the meters above are what you pay.

Prices change without notice and figures here are estimates, not quotes; this site is not affiliated with any provider named above. See the site disclaimer.

Frequently asked questions

How much does 1 TB of egress cost on AWS?

1 TB is 1,024 GB. After the 100 GB monthly free allowance, 924 GB bill at $0.09 each, which is $83.16 per month. The same terabyte costs about $80.39 on Azure zone 1, $122.88 on Google Cloud premium tier, and nothing on Cloudflare R2.

Why does Cloudflare R2 not charge for egress?

R2 makes its money on storage and per-operation fees rather than on data leaving the platform, and Cloudflare's extensive peering keeps its marginal cost of delivery low. The tradeoff is that R2 is object storage with S3-compatible APIs, not a general-purpose cloud, so it replaces the storage-plus-egress part of a bill rather than the whole platform.

Is inter-region data transfer the same as egress?

No. This calculator prices data leaving the cloud for the public internet. Traffic between regions of the same provider is billed on separate, generally lower rate cards — on AWS, moving data between US regions runs around a cent or two per GB, and cross-availability-zone traffic within a region is billed separately again.

How much cheaper is GCP standard tier than premium tier?

Google's standard network tier routes traffic over the public internet instead of Google's backbone and starts at roughly $0.085 per GB in North America, against $0.12 on premium tier — about 30% less at low volumes. Not every product supports standard tier, and premium is the default, which is why this comparison uses premium rates.

Did the EU Data Act make egress free?

Not for day-to-day traffic. The Data Act, applying from September 2025, targets charges for switching providers, and during 2024 AWS, Google Cloud and Azure each announced free egress for customers migrating off their platform — typically granted on request for a one-time move. Regular operational egress is still billed at the rates shown here.