Zero Egress Fees Explained
Egress fees are where cloud bills hide most of their cost. Here's what they are, why providers charge them, and what "zero egress" actually means.
What are egress fees?
Egress fees are charges for data leaving a provider's network — every gigabyte transferred out to users, to another cloud, or back to your own systems. Zero egress means exactly what it says: data transfer out is free, at any volume, so your bill is based on what you use or store rather than on how much you move.
The asymmetry is the tell: uploading data into a cloud (ingress) is almost always free, while getting it back out is metered. Once your data and traffic are inside, every download, restore, and page view has a price attached.
Why do cloud providers charge for egress?
Part of the answer is genuine cost: centralised providers build and operate enormous data centres and the network capacity connecting them, and metering bandwidth is one way to recover that investment. But egress pricing has long outgrown its cost basis — the per-gigabyte rates charged by major clouds are many multiples of what wholesale bandwidth actually costs.
The other part is strategic. Free ingress and expensive egress makes it cheap to move in and costly to leave. Egress fees act as a switching cost: migrating a large dataset to a competitor, or even serving your own content from elsewhere, incurs a bill sized to discourage the attempt. That's why egress charges attract regulatory attention as a form of vendor lock-in.
They also make bills unpredictable. Storage and compute are things you provision deliberately; egress is driven by your users' behaviour. A traffic spike — the best thing that can happen to your product — becomes the worst thing that can happen to your invoice.
What zero egress means at Edge
Edge doesn't charge for bandwidth anywhere in its platform — a position explained in Zero Egress: Why We Don't Charge for Bandwidth. Because the network runs on the distributed spare capacity of independent nodes rather than on centralised data centres, bandwidth isn't the scarce, capitalised resource it is for traditional clouds — so it isn't a line item.
In practice, on the CDN you pay $0.25 per million requests beyond a free tier of 500,000 requests a month, and nothing for the gigabytes delivered — the same price in every region, with no premium routes. On Storage you pay $0.015 per GB-month for what you store (the first 5 GB free), and retrieving your own data — a backup restore, a data migration, public file serving — costs nothing at any scale.
Zero egress also changes behaviour, not just bills. You can serve media-heavy sites without fearing success, restore backups without a penalty, and move data freely between providers — the lock-in mechanism simply isn't there.
CDN egress rates compared
Published per-GB egress rates from our CDN comparison pages.
Where zero egress pays off
The more bytes you move relative to what you store or serve, the bigger the difference.
Media delivery
Video, audio, and image-heavy sites move terabytes per month. On per-GB pricing, bandwidth dwarfs every other cost; on zero egress, it disappears.
Backups & recovery
Egress fees mean paying to retrieve your own data exactly when you need it most. Zero egress makes restores free, however large.
Portability
Without an exit toll, multi-cloud setups and provider migrations become engineering decisions rather than financial ones.
Stop paying for bandwidth
CDN and object storage with zero egress fees — free tiers included, never a surprise bill.