dev · 2026-05-01
Project monthly cloud egress (data transfer out) cost across AWS / GCP / Azure pricing tiers, plus break-even point for CDN deployment.
| Monthly egress (TB) | $25 |
| Cloud provider | AWS ($0.09/GB tier 1) |
| CDN price per GB | $0 |
| CDN monthly fixed cost | $200 |
| Monthly CDN cost | $712 |
| Monthly savings with CDN | $1,515 |
| CDN break-even (months) | 0.0 |
The single most surprising line item in cloud bills. Storing data is cheap. Sending it OUT to users (egress) is brutally expensive: $0.05-0.09/GB at every major cloud, with steep tiered rates that punish high-volume use.
AWS data transfer out:
A 25 TB/mo workload costs ~$2,200/mo at AWS. At 250 TB/mo, $14,000/mo.
Modern CDNs (Cloudflare, Bunny, Fastly) offer egress at a tiny fraction of cloud cost:
The break-even is almost immediate. A 25 TB/mo workload that costs $2,200/mo at AWS becomes $700/mo on Bunny — $1,500/mo savings, $18k/yr.
Industry insiders call it the 'AWS tax.' Cloud providers price ingress at $0 to attract data, then charge premium egress to keep it locked in. Egress costs are far above hardware reality (CDNs deliver same bandwidth at 1/10 the price). It's revenue strategy, not infrastructure cost. Avoid by architecting CDN-first.
If egress is >40% of cloud bill: yes, evaluate. Common move: keep compute + storage on AWS, but route public-facing traffic through Cloudflare/Bunny. R2-style egress-free buckets eliminate ~80% of egress for static assets.
Inter-VPC, inter-region, and PrivateLink traffic are SEPARATE rates from public internet egress. PrivateLink ~$0.01/GB. Direct Connect (dedicated): ~$0.02/GB. If your egress is internal (microservices, replication), the cheaper rates apply but they're still real costs.