Cloud Egress Costs: AWS Charges $0.09/GB — How to Pay Less (2026)

Cloud egress is any data that leaves a provider's network — whether it goes to the public internet, another cloud region, or even a different availability zone. According to Gartner, worldwide public cloud spending reached $679 billion in 2024 (Gartner, 2024 ), and data transfer fees make up a meaningful chunk of that total. The pricing model is asymmetric by design: ingress is free, egress is not.

Why the asymmetry? Cloud providers want your data in. Getting it out is where they charge. This creates a gravitational pull — once your data lives on a provider's infrastructure, moving it somewhere else has a real dollar cost. It's not just a technical consideration. It's a pricing strategy that discourages multi-cloud architectures and provider switches.

Egress charges apply to several types of traffic. API responses sent to end users cost money. Database replication across regions costs money. Backup data transferred off-platform costs money. Even DNS queries can generate transfer costs when you're operating at scale. Most teams don't realize how many services generate outbound traffic until they audit their bill line by line.

Cloud egress — data leaving a provider's network — is priced asymmetrically: ingress is free while egress ranges from $0.08 to $0.19 per GB depending on provider, region, and volume tier (AWS, Azure, GCP, 2026 ). This asymmetry makes data transfer a hidden lock-in mechanism across all major providers.

Egress costs surprise teams because they're spread across dozens of line items rather than appearing as a single charge. If your bill has been climbing month-over-month without an obvious cause, data transfer is often the culprit — our article on why your cloud bill keeps increasing covers the patterns to look for. A 2025 CloudZero analysis found that data transfer accounts for 6–12% of typical cloud bills (CloudZero, 2025 ), yet most teams can't identify where their egress spend is concentrated. The charges are real but hard to see without deliberate analysis.

The problem starts with how providers report these costs. AWS splits data transfer across EC2, S3, CloudFront, RDS, and VPC — each with its own line items. A single application serving API responses might generate egress charges under three different service categories. Unless you're aggregating those line items, your "data transfer" cost looks smaller than it really is.

Free tiers mask the issue early on. AWS includes 100 GB of free internet egress per month. Azure offers 100 GB. GCP provides 200 GB with its Always Free tier. For a new project, egress literally costs nothing. Then traffic grows, the free tier runs out, and suddenly there's a new $200 line item that nobody budgeted for.

Cross-region data transfer is another blind spot. Replicating a database from us-east-1 to eu-west-1 on AWS costs $0.02/GB in both directions. A 500 GB database replicated daily adds $300/month — and that charge is buried under "EC2-Other" in Cost Explorer, not labeled as "database replication."

GCP charges the most for standard egress at $0.12/GB for the first terabyte, while Azure is the cheapest at $0.087/GB for the first 5 TB (Azure Bandwidth Pricing, 2026 ). AWS falls in between at $0.09/GB for the first 10 TB. But headline rates don't tell the full story — volume tiers, premium routes, and regional variations shift the comparison significantly.

AWS egress pricing

AWS keeps it straightforward for the first 10 TB: $0.09/GB after the 100 GB free tier. Rates drop to $0.085/GB between 10–50 TB, then $0.07/GB up to 150 TB (AWS Data Transfer Pricing, 2026 ). S3 Transfer Acceleration adds $0.04/GB on top. CloudFront egress is cheaper at $0.085/GB for the first 10 TB, which is why CDNs reduce total cost even with their own per-request fees.

Azure egress pricing

Azure offers the lowest baseline rate among the big three at $0.087/GB for the first 5 TB. Volume discounts kick in earlier too — $0.083/GB from 5–10 TB (Azure Bandwidth Pricing, 2026 ). Inter-region transfer within the same geography (e.g., East US to West US) costs $0.02/GB each way. Cross-continent transfers cost more — $0.05–$0.08/GB to Asia-Pacific.

GCP egress pricing

GCP has the highest standard egress rate at $0.12/GB for the first terabyte to most destinations. But GCP also offers a "Premium" vs. "Standard" network tier distinction (GCP Network Pricing, 2026 ). Standard tier routes traffic over the public internet and costs $0.085/GB for the first TB — cheaper than both AWS and Azure. The tradeoff is higher latency and less predictable performance.

At the first pricing tier, GCP Premium charges $0.12/GB, AWS charges $0.09/GB, and Azure charges $0.087/GB for internet egress from US regions (AWS, Azure, GCP, 2026 ). However, GCP Standard tier at $0.085/GB undercuts both competitors for latency-tolerant workloads.

The headline egress rate is only part of the picture. NAT Gateway alone adds $0.045/GB in processing fees on top of standard egress on AWS, effectively raising the true cost of internet-bound traffic to $0.135/GB (AWS VPC Pricing, 2026 ). These layered charges are where egress costs go from manageable to shocking.

NAT Gateway processing fees

Every byte that passes through an AWS NAT Gateway gets charged $0.045/GB for "data processing" — regardless of destination. That means traffic to S3, DynamoDB, or any AWS service routed through NAT gets this fee on top of whatever else it costs. A team pushing 10 TB/month through NAT Gateway pays $450 in processing fees alone, before egress charges are even calculated.

Azure and GCP have similar patterns. Azure's NAT Gateway charges $0.045/hr plus $0.045/GB processed (Azure NAT Gateway Pricing, 2026 ). GCP's Cloud NAT charges per GB processed at rates that vary by region but typically land around $0.045/GB. So the NAT tax is roughly consistent across all three providers.

NAT Gateway alone adds $0.045/GB in processing fees on top of every egress charge, and the costs compound quickly in multi-AZ setups. Our deep-dive on AWS NAT Gateway pricing covers VPC endpoint strategies that can eliminate the processing fee entirely for S3 and DynamoDB traffic.

Cross-AZ and cross-region transfer

Sending data between availability zones within the same region costs $0.01/GB per direction on AWS — $0.02/GB round-trip. That sounds small until you have a microservices architecture where services in different AZs talk constantly. An application making 500 million inter-AZ API calls per month at 1 KB each generates 500 GB of cross-AZ traffic, costing $10/month just for the network hop. Scale that across dozens of services and the numbers compound quickly.

Cross-region transfer is more expensive. AWS charges $0.02/GB between US regions. Transfers to Europe or Asia-Pacific cost $0.02–$0.09/GB depending on the route. Multi-region database replication is a common source of these charges. A 500 GB database replicated across three regions generates $20–$90/month in transfer costs alone.

VPC peering and Transit Gateway

VPC peering within the same region is free on AWS — but cross-region peering costs $0.01/GB per direction. AWS Transit Gateway charges $0.02/GB for all data processed, even within the same region. If you're routing traffic through a Transit Gateway instead of direct VPC peering, you're paying an extra $0.02/GB for the convenience of centralized routing.

AWS NAT Gateway charges $0.045/GB processing on top of standard $0.09/GB egress, bringing the true per-GB cost of internet-bound traffic from a private subnet to $0.135 (AWS VPC Pricing, 2026 ). Cross-AZ transfers add $0.01/GB per direction, and Transit Gateway adds $0.02/GB for processed data regardless of destination.

The most effective egress reduction strategies don't require re-architecting your application. Cloudflare reported that using a CDN reduces origin egress by 50–70% for typical web applications (Cloudflare, 2025 ). Combined with same-region deployment, response compression, and caching, most teams can cut egress costs by 40–60% without touching application code.

1. Put a CDN in front of your application

CloudFront, Azure CDN, and Cloud CDN all charge less per GB than direct egress from compute instances. AWS CloudFront costs $0.085/GB for the first 10 TB vs. $0.09/GB for direct EC2 egress (AWS CloudFront Pricing, 2026 ). That's a small per-GB savings, but the real win comes from cache hits. Every request served from a CDN edge is a request that never reaches your origin, generating zero origin egress.

2. Keep services in the same region

Cross-region data transfer costs 2–9x more than same-region traffic. If your frontend runs in us-east-1 and your database sits in eu-west-1, every query pays the cross-region tax. Colocating services in the same region eliminates inter-region transfer charges entirely. Same-AZ deployment goes further — it removes the $0.01/GB cross-AZ charge too.

3. Compress API responses

Enabling gzip or Brotli compression on API responses typically reduces payload size by 60–80% for JSON and text content. If your API serves 5 TB/month of uncompressed JSON responses, compression can reduce that to 1–2 TB. At $0.09/GB, that's $270–$360/month in savings for a configuration change that takes minutes.

4. Use VPC endpoints instead of NAT Gateways

For AWS-to-AWS traffic, VPC Gateway Endpoints for S3 and DynamoDB are free — $0/hr and $0/GB. Interface Endpoints (PrivateLink) cost $0.01/hr + $0.01/GB but still save money compared to the $0.045/GB NAT Gateway processing fee. If 40% of your NAT traffic goes to AWS services, endpoints alone can save you hundreds per month.

Egress waste rarely exists in isolation — teams that overbuild their network topology tend to overprovision compute too. If your bill is climbing for reasons beyond data transfer, read our guide on cloud waste and overprovisioning for a broader diagnosis. Streaming video is especially egress-heavy — see our video streaming cloud costs breakdown.

5. Implement aggressive caching

Cache at every layer: browser caching with proper Cache-Control headers, application-level caching with Redis or Memcached, and CDN caching for static assets and API responses. Each cache hit eliminates one round-trip of egress. A well-configured caching strategy routinely reduces total outbound traffic by 40–60%.

6. Consider dedicated interconnects for high volume

AWS Direct Connect reduces egress from $0.09/GB to $0.02/GB for traffic that goes over a dedicated connection (AWS Direct Connect Pricing, 2026 ). Azure ExpressRoute and GCP Interconnect offer similar discounts. The catch: dedicated connections require a monthly port fee ($0.03/hr for 1 Gbps on Direct Connect) and only make sense above ~5 TB/month of egress where the per-GB savings outweigh the fixed cost.

Estimating egress costs requires knowing three things: monthly outbound volume, traffic destination breakdown, and which network path the traffic takes. AWS reports that data transfer is the third-largest cost category for most accounts after compute and storage (AWS Cloud Financial Management Blog, 2025 ). Yet most teams don't track transfer volume until it becomes a problem.

Start with your cloud provider's cost explorer. Filter for "Data Transfer" or "Bandwidth" charges and look at the last three months. Break it down by service. You'll likely find that 80% of your egress comes from two or three services — typically your application load balancer, S3, and database replication.

For quick estimates, a general rule works: expect egress to cost 6–12% of your total cloud bill. If you're spending $5,000/month on cloud, budget $300–$600 for data transfer. For more precise numbers, the SpendArk cloud cost calculator lets you model egress costs across AWS, Azure, and GCP with volume-based tier calculations built in.

Don't forget to account for growth. If your application traffic doubles, your egress bill won't simply double — you may cross into a cheaper pricing tier, which softens the impact. But NAT Gateway processing fees, cross-AZ charges, and Transit Gateway fees scale linearly with no volume discounts. Factor those in separately.

Data transfer is the third-largest cost category on most cloud bills after compute and storage, accounting for 6–12% of total spend (CloudZero, 2025 ). CDN caching, response compression, and same-region deployment can reduce egress costs by 40–60% without requiring application code changes.