Egress cost (or data egress fee) is the charge that public cloud providers apply to data transferred out of their network — to the internet, to another cloud provider, or to an on-premise environment. Critically, cloud providers typically charge nothing or very little for data transferred into their network (ingress), but charge per-gigabyte fees for data leaving (egress).
The economics of egress
AWS charges between $0.08 and $0.09 per GB for data egress to the internet (as of 2025). GCP charges $0.08 per GB. Azure charges $0.087 per GB. For organisations processing terabytes or petabytes of data — financial transaction records, healthcare imaging, ML training datasets — egress fees are not a line item; they are a primary operating cost.
A mid-sized bank with 10 TB of data movement per month pays approximately $800–$900/month in egress fees alone — before compute, storage, or any other charges. A healthcare organisation with medical imaging data faces much higher volumes. The annual egress bill can easily exceed the capital cost of equivalent on-premise hardware.
Egress as a lock-in mechanism
Egress pricing serves a structural purpose: it makes it expensive to leave a cloud provider or to maintain a multi-cloud architecture where data moves between providers. The higher your egress bill, the higher the switching cost. This is the financial manifestation of vendor lock-in — not contracts, not proprietary APIs, but the brute economic cost of moving your data.
Regulators globally are beginning to address this. The EU's Data Act (2024) includes provisions requiring cloud providers to facilitate switching, including reducing or eliminating egress fees when customers are switching providers. Similar provisions are expected in Indian cloud regulatory frameworks.