OCI Near-Zero Egress — $0.0085/GB vs AWS $0.09/GB — The Biggest Hidden Cloud Cost

Cloud egress fees are one of the most underestimated cost drivers in cloud architecture. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure charges $0.0085/GB for internet egress (the first 10 TB/month is free for Always Free accounts). This compares with AWS at $0.09/GB (first 100 GB free), Azure at $0.087/GB and GCP at $0.08/GB — making OCI egress approximately 10× cheaper than the other major providers.

For organisations running Oracle Database on-premises with analytics in the cloud, data flowing back to on-premises is essentially free via VPN or FastConnect. For SAP customers with HANA as a secondary read system on OCI, the combination of 50% cheaper compute (E5.Flex) and 90% cheaper egress creates a compelling total cost picture.

Real example calculation: a media streaming company serving 200 TB/month of content. AWS egress: $17,820/month. Azure egress: $17,400/month. OCI egress: $1,700/month. Difference: $16,000+/month just in egress. Even accounting for higher OCI compute costs in some configurations, the egress saving dominates for data-heavy workloads. Add Cloudflare in front of OCI for global distribution and you can reduce egress further.

TCOIQ Action: Audit your current monthly egress volume in AWS Cost Explorer (filter by Data Transfer usage type) or Azure Cost Analysis (filter by Bandwidth). Multiply that volume by $0.08 — that is your monthly egress saving opportunity if you move to OCI. For egress over 20 TB/month, a hybrid OCI egress strategy (OCI for egress, keep other clouds for managed services) often pays for itself within 3 months.