Move 10 TB out to the internet this month and the bandwidth line alone runs roughly $913 on AWS, $882 on Azure, and $1,137 on Google Cloud’s Premium Tier. The same transfer out of Cloudflare R2 or Backblaze B2 costs approximately zero. That spread — nearly four figures a month on a single line item — is why egress pricing keeps showing up in every multicloud architecture review I sit in on, and why the 2024 “free exit” announcements from Google and AWS confused so many budget owners.
This brief gives you the current per-GB numbers in one table, explains what the exit-fee waivers actually cover (much less than the headlines implied), and closes with thresholds for when egress should change your architecture rather than just your invoice.
The 2026 egress benchmark
These are internet egress rates as of mid-2026, standard list pricing, US regions. Committed-use discounts, CDN offload, and private interconnects all change the math — but this is the baseline every negotiation starts from.
| Free monthly allowance | First-tier rate | Above 150 TB | 10 TB/month bill (approx.) | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| AWS | 100 GB | $0.09/GB (first 10 TB) | $0.05/GB | $913 |
| Microsoft Azure | 100 GB | $0.087/GB (first 10 TB) | $0.05/GB | $882 |
| Google Cloud (Premium Tier) | Minimal (~1 GiB) | $0.12/GB (first 1 TB) | ~$0.05/GB | $1,137 |
| Google Cloud (Standard Tier) | Minimal | ~$0.085/GB | Tiered lower | ~$850 |
| Cloudflare R2 | Unlimited egress | $0 | $0 | $0 |
| Backblaze B2 | 3× stored data | $0 within allowance | $0.01/GB beyond | $0 for most profiles |
Two footnotes that matter more than the table. First, these are internet egress rates only — cross-availability-zone traffic still bills at about $0.01/GB each way on all three hyperscalers, and NAT gateway processing adds roughly $0.045/GB on AWS. Chatty microservices generate egress-class charges without a single byte leaving the cloud. Second, list pricing varies by region and moves; treat anything beyond two decimal places as negotiable at enterprise scale.
What changed
In early 2024, Google Cloud announced free data transfer for customers leaving its platform, and AWS followed within weeks. Microsoft made a similar commitment for Azure. The driver was regulatory: the EU Data Act, which began applying in September 2025 and requires switching charges to be phased down, with a full ban on profit-bearing switching fees taking effect in January 2027.
Here is the nuance the pricing calculators miss: the waivers cover exit, not operations. AWS’s program, for example, requires that you be moving essentially all your data off the platform, requests go through support, and the credits carry a limited migration window — around 60 days. Google’s works similarly. If you are running a steady-state multicloud architecture — analytics in BigQuery, serving from AWS, backups to a third provider — every gigabyte of that ongoing traffic still bills at the full rates in the table above. The waivers are a one-way door for leavers, not a discount for hybrid operators. That distinction is what actually drives architecture decisions, and it’s why the repatriation math we walked through in our cloud repatriation analysis now excludes exit bandwidth as a blocker: the toll to leave is gone, but the toll to straddle remains.
AWS: predictable tiers, expensive middle
AWS charges $0.09/GB for the first 10 TB of monthly internet egress after a 100 GB free allowance, stepping down through published tiers to $0.05/GB above 150 TB. The strength of the AWS model is predictability and negotiability — the tiers are documented, CloudFront offload is priced aggressively for content-heavy workloads, and at commitment levels egress is a standard line in every Enterprise Discount Program conversation. AWS also deserves credit for making its exit waiver unconditional on destination: you can move to any provider, not just on-premises.
The weakness is the middle of the curve. A workload pushing 20–50 TB/month is too small for meaningful EDP leverage and too large to ignore a $1,700–$4,300 monthly bandwidth line. That band — common for SaaS companies serving media or model artifacts — is exactly where the zero-egress alternatives poach AWS storage workloads. AWS fits teams that value ecosystem depth and can either negotiate scale discounts or push static egress to CloudFront.
Microsoft Azure: cheapest hyperscaler under 50 TB
Azure’s $0.087/GB first tier makes Microsoft the cheapest of the big three below roughly 50 TB/month; above that its tiers converge with AWS at $0.07/GB and then $0.05/GB past 150 TB. For the Microsoft-standardized enterprise the practical advantage is bigger than the headline three-tenths of a cent, because so much traffic that would be billable egress elsewhere stays inside the Microsoft estate — ExpressRoute to on-premises, Microsoft 365 integration, Azure Front Door offload.
Where Azure is weaker is transparency. Its bandwidth pricing page spreads charges across zones and services in a way that makes forecasting harder than on AWS, and inter-region rates vary by geography pairings that surprise teams expanding into Asia-Pacific. Azure fits organizations already committed to Microsoft licensing that can route most traffic over private paths; it is not obviously the value play for a greenfield, internet-facing workload.
Google Cloud: priciest Premium Tier, with an escape hatch
Google Cloud’s default Premium Tier — traffic rides Google’s backbone to the edge — is the most expensive first tier of the three at $0.12/GB for the first 1 TB, stepping down through tiers to roughly $0.05/GB at very high volumes, and its free allowance is negligible. Google was first to waive exit fees, a genuinely pro-customer move that AWS and Microsoft then matched, and its Standard Tier (public-internet routing at around $0.085/GB) is an escape hatch the other two don’t offer as cleanly.
The catch is that Standard Tier trades performance for price — no global backbone, regional-only routing — so latency-sensitive products generally stay on Premium and pay for it. Google Cloud fits data-platform-centric shops where the gravity is BigQuery and Vertex AI and serving egress is modest; it fits poorly as a high-volume content origin unless you deliberately architect around Media CDN or Standard Tier.
The zero-egress challengers
Cloudflare R2 charges nothing for egress, ever — you pay for storage and per-operation fees. Backblaze B2 gives free egress up to three times your average monthly stored data, then about $0.01/GB. Neither is a hyperscaler replacement: you don’t get VPCs, managed databases, or an IAM estate. What they are is a pressure valve for the specific workload class where egress dominates cost — media origins, model weights and artifact distribution, backup restore paths, public datasets.
The rule of thumb I give teams: when annual egress spend on an object-storage workload exceeds the storage spend itself, moving that bucket to R2 or B2 usually pays for the migration inside two quarters. S3-compatible APIs keep the switching cost low, which is precisely why AWS, Microsoft, and Google have not matched the model — zero egress is the challengers’ entire wedge.
What to do about it
Benchmarks are only useful with thresholds attached. Here are the diagnostics I use:
- Egress under 5% of cloud spend: ignore it. Optimize compute and licensing first.
- Egress at 5–15% of spend: tactical fixes — CDN offload for anything static, compress or dedupe transfer paths, kill cross-AZ chatter. Kubernetes clusters are chronic offenders here; topology-aware routing is one of the highest-leverage items in our Kubernetes cost optimization guide.
- Egress above 15% of spend, storage-driven: re-architect. Move the heavy buckets to zero-egress object storage and keep compute where it is.
- Considering a full exit: the waivers mean bandwidth is no longer the blocker — model the migration on labor and refactoring cost instead, and file the waiver request before you start moving data.
The takeaway for the meeting: egress is now a design decision, not a tax. Leaving is free; staying multicloud is not.
Frequently asked questions
Which cloud provider has the cheapest egress fees?
Among hyperscalers, Azure is cheapest below 50 TB/month at $0.087/GB; AWS and Azure converge above that. Cloudflare R2 and Backblaze B2 undercut all three with zero or near-zero egress, at the cost of a much narrower service catalog.
Are AWS egress fees really free now?
Only if you are leaving. AWS waives data transfer charges for customers migrating all their data off the platform, via a support request with a limited migration window. Ordinary operational egress still bills at standard rates starting at $0.09/GB.
Does the EU Data Act ban egress fees?
It bans charges for switching providers, phased in from September 2025 with a full prohibition on profit-bearing switching fees in January 2027. It does not ban operational egress pricing for workloads that stay put.
How do I reduce cloud egress costs without changing providers?
In order of effort: put a CDN in front of static and media traffic, eliminate cross-AZ and NAT gateway paths for high-volume flows, compress data in transit, and move egress-heavy object storage to a zero-egress provider while keeping compute in place.
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