Cloud Egress Cost Calculator

Every cloud provider charges you to store data, but many also charge you to take it back out. That download fee is called "egress" — data transfer out of the cloud to the internet. It surprises people because uploads (ingress) are usually free, so the bill only bites when your users, customers, or your own backups actually download something. For a backup that sits quietly, egress is zero; for a video site serving thousands of viewers, egress can be the single biggest line on the invoice. The sneaky part is the per-gigabyte price. It looks tiny — nine cents, twelve cents — until you multiply it by hundreds or thousands of gigabytes a month. Five hundred gigabytes at $0.09/GB is $45 every month, $540 a year, just for moving your own data home.

Enter how many gigabytes you download per month and pick your provider from the dropdown. The calculator multiplies your gigabytes by that provider's typical per-GB egress rate and shows your monthly cost. Then it benchmarks that number against two famously cheap alternatives — Backblaze B2 at about $0.01/GB, and Cloudflare R2, which charges zero egress fees — and tells you what switching would save per month and per year. The rates used are typical US list prices; the FAQ below explains the fine print.

Say you pull 500 GB a month out of an S3 bucket. At roughly $0.09 per GB, that is 500 × 0.09 = $45.00 a month. The same 500 GB on Backblaze B2 would cost about $5.00 a month (500 × $0.01), and on Cloudflare R2 it would cost $0.00 — no egress fees at all. The verdict: switching to R2 saves about $45 a month, or $540 a year. Even B2 saves $40 a month. When the numbers differ by 10x between providers, the "which cloud" question answers itself.

First, check whether your provider has a free egress allowance — AWS's free tier covers 100 GB of transfer out per month for the first year, which is enough for small projects. Second, use a CDN: caching content at edge locations is often cheaper than repeated origin egress, and some CDNs include generous free transfer. Third, if your workload is download-heavy — media hosting, software downloads, public datasets — price providers by egress first, not storage: a provider that is 20% cheaper on storage but 9x more expensive on egress is the wrong pick. Finally, compress before you download — re-encoding video or compressing backups shrinks both storage and every future egress bill.