The meter you can't see
Most cloud bills have one number everybody watches (compute) and one number almost nobody does (egress — the cost of moving your own data out). The first is a price you can shop on. The second is a meter that spins faster the more successful you get, and it rarely shows up in anyone’s forecast.
Find it on your own bill in five minutes
- Open your latest invoice or a Cost Explorer export.
- Group by usage type and search for
DataTransfer,Egress, orOut-Bytes. - Add up everything billed per-GB out to the internet (ignore in-region, ignore ingress — that’s usually free).
That subtotal is the number that grows with your traffic whether or not you ship a single new feature. On AWS the headline rate has sat at roughly $0.09/GB since 2018, even as wholesale bandwidth more than halved. At 50 TB/month that’s about $53,000 a year in transfer fees alone — before storage, before compute.
Why it matters more than the sticker price
A flat-rate server you rent doesn’t charge you per gigabyte. So the savings from moving traffic-heavy workloads off the hyperscaler (AWS, Azure, Google) don’t just exist — they compound as you grow. That’s the whole thesis of this site, and every guide here puts real, sourced numbers behind it.
If you want the egress line on your bill broken out and costed against owned or flat-rate infrastructure, send it to me — I’ll send back a one-page teardown within a business day. And if moving it wouldn’t actually pay off, I’ll tell you that too.