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Cloud Egress Cost Calculator

Enter your traffic once and see the monthly data transfer bill on AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, Cloudflare, Oracle, DigitalOcean, Linode and Hetzner side by side.

Updated · By Niraj Kumar · 14 sources

Where

Servers and users inServers and users in
Enter volumes inEnter volumes in

Traffic to users

GB / month

Everything your servers, storage and CDN send to users and other services on the internet.

%
No CDNAll of it

Each provider's own CDN: CloudFront, Cloud CDN, Front Door, Cloudflare or Spaces CDN.

Traffic inside the cloud

GB / month

Replication, backups and calls to services in a different region.

GB / month

Service-to-service calls, load balancing and database replicas in other zones of the same region.

NAT and servers

GB / month

Outbound calls, package and image pulls from private subnets.

Usually one per availability zone.

Sets pooled transfer allowances and Cloud NAT's per-VM fee.

Cheapest cloud with serversDigitalOcean$0 a month: this traffic fits in its included allowance
AWS
$998 a month
$11,975 a year
Google Cloud
$1,182 a month
$14,185 a year
Microsoft Azure
$948 a month
$11,370 a year
Every provider on this traffic, per month, North AmericaHover or focus a row for its line items.
  1. 1Cloudflarebandwidth only$0.00Cloudflare runs no servers, so region, zone and NAT traffic is priced on whatever compute sits behind it.
  2. 2DigitalOcean$0.00DigitalOcean has no managed NAT gateway to bill; servers reach the internet on their own addresses.
  3. 3Akamai Cloud (Linode)$0.00Linode has no managed NAT gateway to bill; servers reach the internet on their own addresses.
  4. 4Oracle Cloud$4.25
  5. 5Hetzner Cloud$8.51Uses 10.5 TB against a pooled allowance of 3 TB across 3 servers.
  6. 6Microsoft Azure$948
  7. 7AWS$998
  8. 8Google Cloud$1,182
Line by line, per month
ProviderInternet egressInter-regionCross-AZNAT gateway hoursNAT data processedTotal
Cloudflare–––––$0.00
DigitalOcean–––––$0.00
Akamai Cloud (Linode)–––––$0.00
Oracle Cloud$4.25––––$4.25
Hetzner Cloud$8.51––––$8.51
Microsoft Azure$882$10.00–$32.85$22.50$948
AWS$913$10.00$20.00$32.85$22.50$998
Google Cloud$1,137$10.00$10.00$3.07$22.50$1,182

How is cloud data transfer billed?

On AWS, Google Cloud and Azure, internet egress costs about $0.08 to $0.12 per GB for the first 10 TB a month, falling with volume. Oracle includes 10 TB free, Hetzner, Linode and DigitalOcean bundle terabytes with each server, and Cloudflare charges nothing for bandwidth.

Internet egress is billed in tiers: the first 10 TB a month at the highest rate, cheaper beyond. Traffic sent through a CDN is billed at the CDN's own tiers instead, and cache misses may add an origin-fetch charge. Traffic between regions and between availability zones has its own flat per-GB rate, and a managed NAT gateway charges both by the hour and for every GB it processes, on top of any egress. Budget clouds instead pool a transfer allowance per server and bill a small overage beyond it.

monthly = tiered(internet egress) + CDN delivery + misses × origin fetch + inter-region GB × rate + cross-AZ GB × rate + NAT gateways × hourly × 730 + NAT GB × processing rate
egress
Data leaving the provider's network for the internet
CDN share
The part of internet traffic delivered by the CDN rather than the servers
cache hit ratio
The share of CDN requests answered without asking the origin
cross-AZ
Traffic between availability zones in one region
NAT processing
A per-GB fee for traffic passing through a managed NAT gateway
1 TB
1,024 GB, as AWS, Azure and Google bill it

Worked example

A workload in North America on AWS: 10 TB a month to the internet, 500 GB to another region, 1,000 GB across zones, 500 GB through NAT, on 3 servers.

  1. 1Internet egress: $913
  2. 2Inter-region: $10.00
  3. 3Cross-AZ: $20.00
  4. 4NAT gateway hours: $32.85
  5. 5NAT data processed: $22.50
  6. 6Total: $998 a month

$998 a month on AWS, $11,975 a year. The cheapest cloud listed that runs servers, DigitalOcean, would cost $0.00 a month.

Frequently asked questions

Which cloud has the cheapest egress?

Cloudflare charges nothing for CDN bandwidth or R2 egress, but it does not rent servers. Among clouds that do, Hetzner is cheapest at volume, with 20 TB included per server in Europe and €1 per TB after. Oracle gives 10 TB a month free and $0.0085 per GB beyond it in North America and Europe. Of the big three, Azure's premium-network rates are a little below AWS's, and Google's Premium Tier is the highest.

Why is my data transfer bill so much higher than expected?

Usually because of charges that never appear as "egress" in an architecture diagram. Traffic between availability zones is billed on AWS and Google even inside one region, a NAT gateway charges about $0.045 for every GB it processes on top of normal egress, and replication to a second region is billed per GB. Put these in the calculator next to your internet traffic to see which line dominates.

Does a CDN make bandwidth cheaper?

Usually, per GB. CloudFront's first 10 TB costs $0.085 a GB in North America and Europe against $0.09 from EC2, with 1 TB a month free, and transfer from AWS origins to CloudFront is free. Google's Cloud CDN starts at $0.08 against $0.12 for Premium Tier egress, plus a cache-fill charge on misses. Cloudflare charges nothing for bandwidth at all. The cache hit ratio matters most for origin load and for Google's cache-fill charge.

Why is the NAT gateway so expensive?

Because it bills twice. AWS and Azure charge $0.045 an hour per gateway, about $33 a month, plus $0.045 for every GB processed, and the traffic still pays normal egress once it reaches the internet. A cluster pulling 10 TB of container images a month through NAT pays about $460 in processing alone. S3 and DynamoDB gateway endpoints are free and take that traffic off the NAT path.

Is inbound data transfer free?

Yes, on every provider listed: data coming into the cloud from the internet costs nothing. What you pay for is data going out, to the internet, to another region or, on AWS and Google, to another availability zone. The exception is traffic through a managed NAT gateway, which is billed per GB in both directions.

How can I reduce cloud egress costs?

Put cacheable traffic behind a CDN, which is cheaper per GB than origin egress on AWS, Google and Azure and free on Cloudflare. Use VPC gateway endpoints or Private Google Access so traffic to object storage skips the NAT gateway. Keep chatty services in one availability zone where resilience allows, compress responses, and consider serving large downloads from a zero-egress store such as Cloudflare R2.

Sources

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