Cloud Egress: The $50,000 Line Item Nobody Budgeted For

Published: 2026-05-20
Author: Saascutters
Read time: 6 minutes
Keywords: cloud egress cost, data transfer fees, AWS egress, inter-region transfer, bandwidth cost optimization

Every cloud provider charges for data leaving their network. AWS, GCP, and Azure all structure it differently, but the result is the same: a line item that grows quietly until it becomes one of your largest monthly costs.

We have seen egress bills of $50,000+ per month that the CTO did not know existed until we surfaced it in the audit.

How egress pricing works

AWS: - First 10 GB/month to internet: free - Next 9.99 TB: $0.09 per GB - Inter-region transfer: $0.01–$0.02 per GB - NAT Gateway processing: $0.045 per GB

GCP: - Internet egress: $0.12 per GB (varies by region) - Inter-region: $0.01 per GB - Egress to Cloud CDN: $0.08–$0.20 per GB

Azure: - Internet egress: $0.087 per GB (first 10 TB) - Inter-region: $0.02 per GB - VNet peering: $0.01 per GB

At $0.09 per GB, moving 50 TB per month to the internet costs $4,500. If you are a media or adtech company moving high-resolution video, logs, or analytics data, the number gets large fast.

The common sources of egress waste

1. Logs shipped to a third-party service

Datadog, Splunk, ELK, and every observability vendor charge for ingest — but the cloud provider also charges for the egress that gets the logs out of your account. If you are shipping 500 GB of logs per day, that is 15 TB per month. At $0.09 per GB, your cloud bill adds $1,350 per month just for log shipping.

Fix: ingest logs inside the cloud provider's network. Use CloudWatch (AWS), Cloud Logging (GCP), or Azure Monitor. Or ship aggregated summaries instead of raw logs.

2. Cross-region replication that was never tested

Teams set up cross-region replication for "disaster recovery" and never validate it. The data flows continuously. One healthcare client was replicating 2 TB per day between us-east-1 and us-west-2. Cost: $1,200 per month. The DR plan had never been tested. When we tested it, it failed. The replication was providing false confidence at real cost.

3. Multi-cloud architectures

If your application runs on AWS but your data warehouse is on Snowflake (hosted on Azure or GCP), every query moves data across cloud boundaries. That is egress on the source side and often ingress fees on the destination side. The fix: keep compute and data in the same region and, where possible, the same cloud provider.

4. CDN origin fetches

CloudFront, Cloudflare, and Fastly are supposed to reduce egress by caching at the edge. But if your cache hit ratio is low, the CDN becomes an additional layer of egress cost. Check your cache hit ratio. If it is under 80%, your content is not cacheable, your TTLs are too short, or your cache keys are too granular.

How to audit your egress

AWS: Go to Cost Explorer → Group by → Usage Type. Filter for DataTransfer. GCP: Go to Billing → Cost Breakdown → SKUs. Filter for Egress and Network. Azure: Go to Cost Management → Cost analysis. Filter by meter for Bandwidth and Data Transfer.

Sort by cost. The top 3 SKUs usually account for 70% of your egress spend. Focus there.

When to hire outside help

If your monthly egress bill is over $5,000, the audit requires VPC flow log analysis, architecture review, and CDN tuning. That is two to three weeks of senior engineering work. Saascutters runs egress audits as part of our infrastructure engagements. We find the leaks, restructure the architecture, and verify the savings against your prior invoices. Thirty percent of verified first-year savings. No retainer. Request an infrastructure audit →