Egress is the bill you forget to budget
Storage looks cheap until you move data out. Cache at the edge and keep traffic in-region to tame it. Pair with the CDN cost calculator to see the offload.
Egress: the cloud's exit toll
Moving data into clouds is free; moving it out costs $0.05–$0.09/GB. That asymmetry is strategic — egress fees are the moat that makes multi-cloud and migration expensive. A 100TB monthly pipeline to an external analytics stack runs $5,000–$9,000 in egress alone, often exceeding the compute that produced the data. The pressure valves: same-region private links to partner services (cheaper or free), egress-free storage vendors (R2, B2) for content serving, and EU data-portability rules that forced free full-migration egress on the majors — a one-time exit, not an operating mode. Design data flows so bulk bytes stay inside one provider's walls.