S3 Egress Fees: Why Downloading Your Own Data Costs So Much
Cross-posted from the Runsite blog . You put a few hundred gigabytes of images on object storage, glance at the pricing page, and the numbers look friendly: storage is a couple of dollars a month, basically a rounding error. Then the first real invoice arrives and it's a hundred and something. Nothing about how much you're storing changed. The line that blew up isn't storage at all. It's egress —…
Downloading your own data from object storage can be surprisingly expensive, even when storage fees seem affordable on the surface. The hidden cost is egress, which charges for data leaving the provider's network. This charge shows up every time someone downloads your files, not just once when you upload them. Popular files get downloaded frequently, leading to substantial egress fees.
Even serving content through a CDN or replicating data within the same provider counts as egress. To calculate your actual bill, you need to add up both your storage costs and the egress cost based on the number of gigabytes served out. Some providers offer flat-rate storage pricing, where egress is eliminated altogether, making it a more predictable and potentially cheaper option.
This shift towards zero-egress pricing can significantly simplify cost management and reduce the risk of vendor lock-in.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
