Here's a number that doesn't appear on any cloud provider's headline pricing: the cost to get your data back out. It's called egress - bandwidth leaving the provider's network - and on the big three clouds it runs around $0.09 per GB. On Hetzner it's closer to $0.001 per GB. That's not a typo. For the exact same terabyte of traffic, one bill is ~$90 and the other is ~$1.
Egress is the single most under-priced line item in cloud comparisons, because it's the one you can't see when you're shopping. The sticker price is the compute. The surprise is the bandwidth. This guide breaks down what egress actually costs across the major developer clouds in August 2, 2026, why the spread is so wide, and how to keep it from quietly doubling your bill.
What "egress" actually means
Every byte your server sends to the outside world - an API response, an image, a video segment, a database backup you download - is egress. Traffic into the provider (ingress) is almost always free. Traffic out is where they make margin. The catch is that most providers bundle a chunk of egress into each plan for "free," then charge per-GB once you exceed it - and the bundle sizes and overage rates vary by nearly two orders of magnitude.
Egress pricing across the major clouds
Rough figures as of August 2, 2026 - always confirm against the live board, since these move:
| Provider | Included transfer | Overage (per GB) | Cost of 5 TB/mo* |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hetzner | ~20 TB / server | ~$0.001 | $0 |
| Linode / Akamai | 1-11 TB pooled | ~$0.005 | ~$0 |
| Vultr | 1-10 TB / plan | ~$0.01 | ~$0 |
| DigitalOcean | 0.5-10 TB pooled | ~$0.01 | ~$10-40 |
| AWS | 100 GB / account | ~$0.09 | ~$440 |
| Google Cloud | ~200 GB (varies) | ~$0.12 | ~$575 |
| Azure | 100 GB / account | ~$0.087 | ~$425 |
*5 TB is a mid-size month for a small SaaS with images or an API doing real traffic. Hyperscaler figures assume you've blown past the free tier; volume discounts kick in much higher up.
Why the spread is so extreme
Two different business models. Hetzner, Vultr, and Linode are infrastructure companies - bandwidth is a cost they bundle to win developers, so they include multiple terabytes and price overages near their own wholesale cost. AWS, GCP, and Azure treat egress as a product: it's high-margin, it's sticky (moving data out is expensive, so you don't leave), and it's rarely the thing a buyer benchmarks. The compute looks competitive on the pricing page precisely because the bandwidth isn't on it.
A worked example: the $6 server that costs $450
Say you run an image-heavy app - a small marketplace, a portfolio host, a media API. You pick a $6/mo compute instance because that's the number you compared. It serves 5 TB of images a month.
- On Hetzner or Vultr: $6 compute + $0 egress = ~$6/mo.
- On AWS: $6 compute + ~$440 egress = ~$446/mo.
Same workload. A 74× difference - and every dollar of it lives in the line item you didn't compare. This is the entire reason we rank compute by total cost including egress rather than sticker price. A $4 instance with $0.09/GB bandwidth is not cheaper than an $8 instance with 20 TB included, and a comparison that stops at the sticker will tell you the wrong thing.
How to keep egress from eating your bill
- Estimate your real outbound traffic first. Multiply average response size by requests per month. If it's more than a few hundred GB, egress is now a primary factor in your provider choice - not an afterthought.
- Prefer providers with generous included transfer for anything bandwidth-heavy (media, downloads, public APIs). Hetzner, Vultr, and Linode effectively zero out egress for most small-to-mid apps.
- Put a CDN in front of static assets. A cache layer (Cloudflare, Bunny, Fastly) serves repeat requests without touching your origin's metered egress - often the single biggest lever on a media-heavy bill.
- Watch cross-region and cross-AZ transfer on the hyperscalers. Moving data between their own zones is also billed, and it surprises people even more than internet egress.
- Compare total cost, not sticker price. The instance price is one input. Egress, storage, and included bandwidth are the rest.
The bottom line
Egress is the cloud's most reliable surprise. For a compute-light, bandwidth-heavy app, it can dwarf the thing you actually compared. If your workload sends real traffic, a provider with terabytes of included transfer isn't just cheaper - it removes an entire category of bill-shock. Compare the whole number, not the headline.
Browse the compute marketplace to see included transfer and egress rates alongside each plan's price - ranked by what you'll actually pay, not the sticker.