What will it cost just to get our data out?
Cloud data gravity has a price tag, and you only see it when you try to leave. Egress fees scale with everything you've ever stored, so the exit gets quietly more expensive the longer you stay. Enter how much data you'd move out of AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud and this estimator prices the transfer-out tax from each provider's published tiers, and shows you all three side by side.
| Pricing tier | Volume | $/GB | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| 100–10,100 GB | 10,000 GB | $0.090 | $900 |
| 10,100–20,000 GB | 9,900 GB | $0.085 | $842 |
| One-time egress cost | $1,742 | ||
Note: First 100 GB/mo aggregated across services is free; rates shown are US regions to the internet. NAT Gateway and cross-AZ traffic bill separately.
Public list price · AWS EC2 On-Demand Pricing (Data Transfer), as of Jul 2026.
Illustrative list-price estimate, not a quote. Real egress bills depend on region, network tier, committed-use discounts, private interconnects, and per-service specifics. This models standard internet egress to give you an order-of-magnitude "cost of leaving" before you commit, always validate against your own billing console and the vendor's current pricing page.
Why egress is the cloud's quietest lock-in
Getting data into a cloud is usually free. Getting it out is metered per gigabyte, and that asymmetry is the point: it makes accumulating data cheap and reversing that decision expensive. For a large estate the egress bill alone can run into five or six figures, enough to stall a repatriation or a multi-cloud move on its own. Because it never appears until you attempt the exit, teams routinely discover it mid-project, after the decision to leave has already been made.
This is the same data-gravity dynamic the Lock-in Index scores for the hyperscalers: the lock isn't any single contract clause, it's the accumulated cost of moving what you've stored. Pricing it in advance turns a nasty surprise into a line item you can plan and negotiate around.
Sources & method
The tool models standard internet egress to the open internet using each provider's public list pricing, deliberately the simple case, so the number is an honest floor you can reason about. Every rate is cited to a first-party pricing page and re-checked automatically:
- Amazon Web Services (EC2) — AWS EC2 On-Demand Pricing (Data Transfer), as of Jul 2026
- Microsoft Azure — Azure Bandwidth Pricing, as of Jul 2026
- Google Cloud — Google Cloud VPC Network Pricing, as of Jul 2026
A real exit may also incur inter-region replication (add it as a line in the tool), NAT gateway charges, per-request API costs, and snapshot-export fees. The estimate is an order-of-magnitude planning figure, not a quote, always validate against your own billing console and the vendor's current pricing.
Frequently asked
What is data egress and why does it cost money?
Egress is data leaving a cloud provider's network for the internet or another region. Providers charge per gigabyte for it, so the more data you've accumulated, the more expensive it is to move out, a cost that only shows up when you try to leave.
Are these prices exact?
They're each provider's public list price for standard internet egress, cited with a source and date. Your real bill depends on region, network tier, committed-use discounts, and private interconnects. Treat the result as an order-of-magnitude figure and confirm against your billing console.
Does this include storage or API costs?
No, it models network egress, which usually dominates a data-exit bill. Object retrieval, API requests, and snapshot exports can add to it; the tool lets you add a cross-region line for staged cutovers.
How do I reduce egress cost when leaving?
Negotiate waived egress on termination (worth asking for, see the Renewal Redline), export in bulk rather than trickling, and compress where possible. The comparison strip also shows which cloud is cheapest to leave for the same volume.