Egress is the cost of moving data out of a cloud, metered per gigabyte, and it is the line item that can quietly make or break a migration or repatriation case. Internet egress on AWS, Azure, and GCP is tiered and steps down with volume but still reaches serious money at petabyte scale, while OCI prices egress materially below the hyperscalers and includes a large free monthly allowance. Several providers now waive egress entirely when you fully exit the platform, prompted by regulation such as the EU Data Act, but those waivers come with conditions, full account closure, substantially all data moved, a defined request process, and a time window, so a partial or hybrid move usually does not qualify. The buyer job is to size the exit bill precisely before committing, then pull the levers that lower it: move less, compress, use physical transfer for very large one time moves, route over private links, and time the move to fit a waiver or a low tier.
Here is how to size the cost and the levers that reduce it.
How is egress priced across the four clouds?
| Provider | Internet egress structure | Buyer note |
|---|---|---|
| AWS | Tiered per GB, steps down with volume, small free monthly allowance | Inter region and NAT transfer add to the headline rate |
| Azure | Tiered per GB, broadly comparable to AWS | Bandwidth pricing varies by source region |
| GCP | Tiered per GB, premium versus standard network tier matters | Standard tier can lower egress where latency allows |
| OCI | Large free monthly allowance, then materially lower per GB | Egress is a structural OCI cost advantage |
All rates are indicative and tiered; price your exact source region and destination against each provider's current pricing page, because egress economics drive the repatriation decision more than compute does.
Do exit waivers actually make leaving free?
Sometimes, but only under their terms. In response to the EU Data Act and competitive pressure, AWS, Azure, GCP, and others introduced free egress for customers who fully leave the platform. The consistent conditions are that you must be closing the account and migrating substantially all of your data off the provider, you must request the waiver through a defined process rather than receiving it automatically, and you must complete within a stated window. A hybrid estate that keeps workloads on the provider, or a partial migration of one dataset, generally will not qualify and pays standard egress. So the waiver is real money for a genuine full exit and irrelevant for a partial move, which is a distinction the business case has to get right before counting on it.
What levers actually lower the exit bill?
Start by moving less: archive or delete stale, duplicate, and obsolete data before you transfer a byte, because the cheapest egress is data you do not move. Compress and deduplicate what remains. For very large one time moves, a physical data transfer appliance shipped by the provider can beat network egress outright on both cost and time, so price it against the wire. Route over private interconnect or direct connection where that lowers the rate versus public internet egress. Check whether a full exit waiver applies and, if it does, sequence the migration to complete inside its window. And where the move is to another cloud rather than on premises, weigh whether landing in OCI, with its lower egress and ingress economics, changes the ongoing data movement math. Each lever is independent, and on a large estate they compound.
A worked example
A Fortune 500 media company evaluated repatriating a large media archive off a hyperscaler, and the first egress estimate, priced at the standard tiered internet rate against the full dataset, was large enough to threaten the whole business case. Three moves changed the outcome. A data lifecycle pass found that a meaningful share of the archive was obsolete or duplicated and could be deleted before transfer rather than moved. The remaining bulk qualified for a physical transfer appliance, which beat network egress on both cost and elapsed time. And because the workload was fully exiting that provider, it met the conditions for the exit egress waiver, removing most of the residual transfer charge. The repatriation that looked uneconomic at the headline egress rate became clearly positive once the exit was sized and sequenced properly. Figures are verified against billing data and anonymised.
Frequently asked questions
How much does it cost to move data out of a cloud?
Do cloud providers waive egress fees when you leave?
How do you reduce egress cost on a migration?
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