Glossary

Egress fees

Egress fees are charges for moving data out of a cloud provider's network, billed per gigabyte and separately from storage. Data coming in is usually free and data going out is metered, so the fee recurs every time the same data is read out, and it peaks during restores and migrations.

How the charge is expressed

Egress is priced per gigabyte, usually in monthly volume bands where the rate falls as volume rises. The fee attaches to each transfer rather than to the data: reading the same dataset out twice is billed twice. As a worked example, at an illustrative blended rate of 8 cents per gigabyte, reading 100 TB out in a month costs about $8,000, and the same read the following month costs the same again. Many providers include a small free monthly allowance, far below what a restore or migration reads. Faster or prioritized transfer options, where offered, carry a higher rate again.

The events that drive it

Budgets built from an ordinary month assume small, steady reads. The expensive months are of a different kind, because they read everything at once:

  • A full restore, after ransomware or a site loss, when the whole protected dataset comes back out during an incident.
  • A migration to another provider or back to owned infrastructure, which reads the complete dataset once, as described under cloud migration.
  • An audit or legal pull from cool or archive tiers, where retrieval fees are added to transfer fees.
  • Recurring cross-region traffic, from pipelines that process in one region and store in another, or from cloud storage replication between regions or providers.

What the figure reveals

Pricing those events before choosing a provider gives a cost to leave alongside the cost to stay. The gap between the two is a practical measure of lock-in, and it grows with the dataset, which is one reason large datasets resist moving, as explained under data gravity. On owned infrastructure reads are not metered per gigabyte, so the comparison changes how hybrid and multi-cloud exit plans are costed. Cross-region charges are the line items most often missed in cloud cost management.

Regulation on switching charges

The EU Data Act, Regulation (EU) 2023/2854, applicable since September 2025, limits what providers may charge customers who switch to another provider or to their own infrastructure. Switching charges, including the egress used to switch, may not exceed the provider's costs during a transition period and are to be abolished from 12 January 2027. Egress in ordinary operation, outside a switch, is not covered.

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between ingress and egress?

Ingress is data entering a provider and is usually free. Egress is data leaving it and is metered per gigabyte.

Do egress fees apply inside one provider?

Usually not within the same region and service, but transfers between regions, and at some providers between availability zones, are commonly charged.