OCI Expands Free Egress to 10TB/Month for All Paid Accounts — Data Transfer Costs 10× Less Than AWS Even After Free Allowance

What Changed?

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure expanded the monthly free egress (outbound data transfer to internet) allowance from 10TB for Always Free accounts only, to 10TB free for all paid OCI accounts regardless of tier. After the free 10TB, egress is billed at $0.0085/GB — unchanged. This means an OCI customer transferring 15TB of data to internet users pays for only 5TB at $0.0085/GB = $42.50/month total egress cost.

Why Egress Pricing Is Critical

Egress fees are one of the most significant and frequently underestimated components of cloud cost for data-serving applications. Every time your application sends data to a user's browser, a mobile app, an API consumer, or a partner system — that data transfer is billed by the cloud provider. AWS charges $0.09/GB for internet egress (first 100GB free monthly). Azure charges $0.087/GB. GCP charges $0.08/GB. OCI charges $0.0085/GB — approximately 10× cheaper. For the same 50TB/month of egress: AWS = $4,500, Azure = $4,350, GCP = $4,000, OCI = $340 (10TB free + 40TB × $0.0085).

Real-World Impact Calculations

Media streaming company serving 200TB/month: AWS = $18,000 egress, OCI = $1,615. E-commerce platform with 30TB/month of image and product data serving: AWS = $2,700, OCI = $170. SaaS company with large file downloads (reports, exports): AWS = varies, OCI = 10× cheaper post-free-tier. Over a 3-year period, an application with 50TB/month egress saves: (4,500 - 340) × 36 = $149,760 in egress alone by running on OCI vs AWS. This saving is often larger than the compute cost difference, making OCI dramatically cheaper as a total system cost for data-heavy applications.

How to Calculate Your Potential Saving

In AWS: go to Cost Explorer → Usage Type Group → filter by "DataTransfer-Out-Bytes" → view last 3 months → note the monthly GB volume. Multiply that GB volume by $0.08 (the per-GB difference between AWS and OCI). That is your monthly egress saving opportunity if you ran the same workload on OCI. For workloads under 10TB/month, OCI egress would be entirely free — an infinite percentage saving.

Who Should Act Now

Organisations paying over $1,000/month in cloud egress fees should model a full OCI migration for their highest-egress workloads. The egress saving alone often justifies migration even before considering OCI's compute pricing advantage (typically 50-70% cheaper than AWS/Azure for equivalent specs). For organisations not ready to fully migrate: a hybrid architecture where OCI hosts the data serving layer (CDN origin, file download servers, API with large response payloads) while keeping other workloads on current cloud can capture most of the egress saving with minimal migration effort.