The Hidden Cost of Cloud Storage – What Egress Fees Really Cost You

When organisations compare cloud storage providers, they usually start with one number – the price per terabyte per month. It’s easy to compare, it fits neatly on a slide, and it’s rarely the number that ends up on the invoice.

The figure that catches teams out is egress: the charge for getting your own data back out. It tends to appear at the worst possible moment, such as during a restore, a migration or an audit. This article explains what egress fees are, where they bite, and how to avoid building them into your storage strategy.

What are egress fees?

Egress fees are charges levied when data leaves a cloud provider’s network, whether that’s a download to your office, a transfer to another provider, or a restore to on-premises systems. Uploading data (ingress) is almost always free. Taking it back is not.

Take Amazon S3 as the best-known example. Based on published US East list prices, AWS includes 100GB of free internet data transfer out each month, then charges around $0.09 per GB for the first 10TB, falling in tiers to $0.05 per GB at very high volumes. Rates vary by region and change over time, so always check the provider’s current pricing page. The principle is the same across the major hyperscalers: storing data is cheap, and moving it is where the meter runs.

Why the headline price is misleading

A storage price of a few pounds per terabyte looks like the whole story. But the real cost of object storage has three parts:

• Capacity – what you pay to keep data at rest.
• Requests – charges for API calls such as PUT, GET and LIST on some platforms.
• Egress – what you pay whenever data leaves.

Only the first is predictable. The other two depend on how often, and how urgently, you need your data. That makes budgeting difficult, and it means the cost of an incident is hardest to predict at exactly the point when you can least afford surprises.

A working example: restoring 50TB

Imagine you hold 50TB of backup data in a hyperscaler’s object storage and need to restore all of it after a ransomware incident.

Using the published AWS tiers (US East list rates), the first 10TB costs about $900 and the next 40TB at $0.085 per GB adds around $3,400. That’s roughly $4,300 in egress alone for a single full restore, on top of the monthly storage bill.

Now compare that to a provider that doesn’t charge for egress. PeaSoup’s S3-compatible storage is priced at £4.99 per TB per month, with no egress or API request fees. At 50TB that’s £249.50 a month, and a full restore adds nothing to that bill.

The point isn’t that you’ll restore everything every month. It’s that the cost of your worst day should not be a mystery.

Where egress fees catch organisations out

Egress rarely hits during routine use. It hits during the moments that matter most:

Backup restores.

Backups are only valuable if you can get them back. A large restore after an outage or cyber attack is exactly when egress charges peak. Teams sometimes hesitate to run restore tests because of the cost, which defeats the purpose.

Disaster recovery exercises.

Regular DR testing is good practice and often a compliance requirement. If every test generates a data transfer bill, there’s a financial incentive to test less.

Migrations and exits.

Moving to a new provider means pulling everything out of the old one. Egress charges are one of the most common reasons organisations feel locked into a platform they’ve outgrown.

Analytics and AI workloads.

Training pipelines and analytics engines read the same large datasets repeatedly. If that data lives in one provider and the compute in another, every read is billable.

Multi-cloud architectures.

A multi-cloud strategy works best when data can move freely between platforms. Per-GB transfer charges quietly penalise exactly the flexibility the strategy is meant to deliver.

Egress and vendor lock-in

Egress fees are more than a cost line; they shape behaviour. When leaving a provider carries a five- or six-figure transfer cost, the practical result is that data stays put, whether or not that’s the best home for it.

This is why S3 compatibility matters. Because the S3 API is the industry standard, applications and backup tools can usually switch endpoints with little or no code change. But a portable API only delivers real freedom if moving the data itself isn’t penalised. For a deeper comparison, see our guides on AWS S3 vs S3-compatible storage and AWS S3 alternatives.

Questions to ask any storage provider

Before committing to a platform, put these questions to the vendor in writing:

1. What does it cost to download or restore 100% of my data in one month?
2. Are there charges for API requests, retrievals or early deletion?
3. Is there a free allowance, and what happens when I exceed it?
4. What would it cost to migrate all my data to another provider?
5. Where is my data stored, and is UK residency contractually guaranteed?
6. Does the platform support object lock for immutable, ransomware-resistant backups?

The answers will tell you more about the true cost of ownership than any price-per-terabyte headline.

The no-egress alternative

A growing number of organisations now treat predictable pricing as a requirement rather than a bonus, particularly in the public sector, education, healthcare and financial services, where budgets are fixed and data volumes only grow.

PeaSoup’s S3-compatible storage is built around that principle: £4.99 per TB per month, no egress or API request fees, UK-only data residency, and object lock for immutable retention. It works with established tools including Veeam, Commvault, Rubrik, Synology and QNAP, and the infrastructure runs on liquid immersion cooling, which reduces the energy overhead of cooling the data centre. There’s no minimum commitment, so you can test it against your own workloads.

Key takeaways

• The price per terabyte is only part of the cost; egress is often the largest unpredictable element.
• Egress charges peak during restores, DR tests, migrations and analytics, the moments you can least afford surprises.
• Per-GB transfer fees reinforce vendor lock-in, even when the API is standard.
• Ask every provider what a full restore and a full exit would cost before you sign.
• Predictable, egress-free pricing makes budgeting, testing and recovery simpler.

Want to see what you’d save? Use the cost calculator on our S3 storage page or talk to our team about a tailored quote.