---
title: "Zero Egress Fees Explained"
description: "What egress fees are, why cloud providers charge them, and what zero egress means in practice for CDN and object storage bills."
url: https://edge.network/academy/zero-egress-explained/
---

# Zero Egress Fees Explained

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6 min read

# 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](https://edge.network/latest/zero-egress).
Because the network runs on the distributed spare capacity of
[independent nodes](https://edge.network/academy/what-is-an-edge-node) 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](https://edge.network/cdn/pricing) 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](https://edge.network/storage/pricing) 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](https://edge.network/cdn/compare).

Provider
Egress Fees

Edge
Free — at every scale, in every region

Bunny.net
$0.01–0.06/GB

CDN77
$0.049/GB+

Fastly
$0.08–0.28/GB

Akamai
$0.10/GB+

## 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.

[Start Free](https://edge.network/account) [Explore Edge Storage](https://edge.network/storage)

## Related articles

[CDN Pricing Comparison 8 min](https://edge.network/academy/cdn-pricing-comparison) [Decentralised Cloud Storage Explained 8 min](https://edge.network/academy/decentralised-cloud-storage) [Cost Optimization 8 min](https://edge.network/academy/cost-optimization)

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