Cloud Egress Costs Explained: Why AWS Bills You $54,000 for Sending Data

What is Cloud Data Egress?

Data egress refers to data transferred out of a cloud provider — to the internet, to your on-premises systems, or to another cloud provider. Ingress (data going in) is typically free. Egress is not.

The Real Cost of Egress

Why is Egress So Expensive?

Cloud providers argue that egress costs reflect real infrastructure costs — bandwidth at data centre scale is genuinely expensive. Critics argue that high egress pricing is intentional vendor lock-in: the higher the cost to move your data out, the less likely you are to switch providers or use multi-cloud architectures.

Inter-Region Transfer Costs

Egress between regions within the same cloud is also charged: AWS inter-region: $0.02/GB. This means that a distributed application transferring 10TB/month between US-East and Singapore costs $200/month just in internal data transfer fees.

The OCI Egress Advantage

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is dramatically different. OCI provides 10 TB of free egress per month — more than any other major cloud. Beyond 10TB, pricing is $0.0085/GB — 94% cheaper than AWS. For organisations with high data transfer volumes, this single difference can save tens of thousands annually.

Strategies to Reduce Egress Costs

• Keep compute and storage in the same region: Don't process data in one region and store it in another
• Use CDN for static content: CloudFront, Azure CDN and Fastly are all cheaper than direct egress
• Compress data before transfer: Reduce the volume being transferred
• Evaluate OCI for data-intensive workloads: The egress savings alone can dwarf other cost differences
• Consider Direct Connect / ExpressRoute: Dedicated network connections often have lower effective egress costs for high-volume on-premises transfer

For any workload transferring more than 10TB per month, model OCI as a comparison — the egress savings alone can fund multiple other cloud services.