The number on the pricing page is not the number on the invoice
Amazon S3 Standard storage costs $0.023 per GB per month in us-east-1 — about $23 to park a terabyte for a month. That is the figure quoted in decks and comparison tables. It is also half the bill. The moment you move that terabyte back out to the internet, AWS charges egress: $0.09 per GB after the first 100 GB free, roughly $90 per terabyte. Store one TB, read it once, and you have paid about $113 — not $23. (Rates as of June 2026, us-east-1.)
Egress is the line item that turns a cheap-looking storage bill into a surprise. Capacity rarely hurts. Movement does.
What egress actually is
Cloud providers bill data transfer asymmetrically. Putting data in is almost always free — they want your bytes on their platform. Reading them back out to the public internet is metered per gigabyte. Transfer inside one region is cheap or free; cross-region and cross-AZ traffic each have their own meters. The rate that bites is the internet-facing one, because you hit it every time a user downloads a file, a CDN misses its cache, or a backup restore pulls everything home at once.
The structure is deliberate. Cheap to enter, expensive to leave is the economics of lock-in. The storage rate is the advertised price. Egress is where the margin lives.
Storage rate vs. egress rate, side by side
Here is the per-TB picture for the three hyperscalers, internet egress to the first tier, as of June 2026. Storage is per TB-month; egress is what one full read of that TB costs.
- AWS S3 Standard (us-east-1): storage
~$23/TB-month; egress~$90/TB($0.09/GBafter 100 GB free). Store and read once: ~$113/TB. - Azure Blob Storage (hot, LRS): storage
~$18.40/TB-month; egress~$87/TB($0.087/GB). Marginally cheaper to leave than AWS — same shape. - Google Cloud Storage (Standard, us-central1): storage
~$20/TB-month; egress~$120/TB($0.12/GBon the first tier). The cheapest-looking storage line, the most expensive door.
Notice the pattern. Storage prices cluster within a few dollars per TB. Egress runs four to six times the storage rate and varies far more between providers. Optimize a migration around the storage column and you are tuning the wrong number. The egress column decides the bill the day you actually use your data.
Why the bill arrives as a surprise
Egress is usage-driven, not capacity-driven. You can forecast storage from how much you upload. You cannot forecast egress without knowing how often every object gets read — and read patterns spike. An asset goes viral, a re-indexing job sweeps the whole bucket, a misconfigured client retries downloads in a loop, a disaster-recovery restore pulls a full copy. Each is an unbudgeted egress event on a meter you forgot was running.
The free tier hides the rate. AWS, Azure, and Google each hand you 100 GB/month of free internet egress. Below that line you pay nothing and learn nothing. The first time you cross it at scale, the rate that was always there becomes a four-figure line item.
And the pricing page leads with storage. Comparison content ranks providers by the $/GB-month storage number because it is one clean figure. Egress is tiered, region-dependent, and tangled up with CDN and cross-region rules, so it gets a footnote. The footnote is the actual cost of using the service.
The regulatory crack in the model
Egress lock-in is now a regulatory target. Under the EU Data Act, switching charges — explicitly including the data-egress charges you incur to move to another provider — must be gone by 12 January 2027. The hyperscalers got ahead of it: Google announced free switching egress in January 2024, AWS in March 2024, Azure shortly after.
Read the fine print before you celebrate. Those programs apply only when you are leaving the provider entirely — emptying the account, shutting it down, reviewed case by case by support. They do nothing for the egress you pay every ordinary day while you keep using the service. The expensive door is free now, but only if you walk all the way through it and never come back. The cost of living there is unchanged.
What flat pricing looks like instead
Egress fees exist because the hyperscalers sell raw infrastructure, priced for engineers building systems on top of it. For storing and retrieving your own files, that model is a tax on something you should be able to do for free: read your own data.
Beebeeb prices by capacity, not by movement. The plans on our pricing page are flat per tier — Starter at €1.99/month for 100 GB, Basic at €3.99/month for 200 GB, Pro at €10.99/month for 1 TB, scaling to 99 TB self-serve at +€10.99 per extra TB, with a custom quote beyond that. Downloading your files is not a separate meter. No $0.09/GB surprise for reading what you already pay to store.
We can charge that way because we are a storage product, not a rented data center — and because the data is end-to-end encrypted, the economics work without the usage surveillance egress metering implies. Beebeeb is zero-knowledge on every tier, no exceptions: your keys never leave your device, so we could not meter your access by content if we wanted to. Files live on dedicated servers in Falkenstein, Germany.
The headline storage rate was never the real question. The question is what it costs to get your data back. On the hyperscalers, that answer is roughly four times the storage rate, billed the moment you need it. Price the column that actually moves.