Cloud Bandwidth Cost Calculator
Enter your monthly outbound traffic and see what each provider would bill you for it.
Outbound only. Inbound is free on every provider here. 1 TB = 1,000 GB.
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List prices as of 2026-09-09. Estimates only, before discounts, commitments and taxes. See the rates, assumptions and sources.
What this calculator covers
One number: standard data transfer out to the public internet, from a compute instance in a US or European region, at published list price. That is the line item that surprises people, and it is the one that scales with your traffic rather than with your server count.
Several things are deliberately not in the model, because they are priced on their own rate cards and folding them in would produce a confident wrong number:
- Inter-region and cross-AZ transfer. AWS bills region to region and, in some cases, availability zone to availability zone at rates unrelated to internet egress. If most of your traffic is between your own machines, this calculator is answering a different question than the one you have.
- CDN egress. CloudFront, Cloud CDN and Azure Front Door have their own rate cards, usually cheaper per GB than instance egress, and the origin fetch behind them may be billed too.
- Managed service surcharges. NAT gateways, load balancers, VPN and interconnect all add per-GB processing charges on top of the egress rate.
- Regional premiums. Asia Pacific, South America and Africa cost meaningfully more everywhere. Azure Zone 2 runs well above Zone 1, and AWS Singapore starts at $0.12/GB rather than $0.09/GB.
- Your negotiated rate. Committed spend agreements and private pricing routinely beat list. If you are large enough to have one, use it instead.
Units. This tool treats 1 TB as 1,000 GB. Providers are not consistent here: several meter and bill in binary GiB and TiB while writing "GB" on the pricing page. The difference reaches about 7% at TB scale, so read the output as a close estimate rather than an invoice.
Why the same gigabyte costs 100x more on one cloud than another
Wholesale IP transit is cheap and has been getting cheaper for two decades. At the volumes a hyperscaler buys, the underlying cost of moving a gigabyte is a fraction of a cent. The spread you see in the calculator is therefore not a cost difference, it is a pricing decision, and the three groups below are pricing different things.
Metered egress (AWS, Google Cloud, Azure)
Bandwidth is a separate metered line item with volume tiers. The tiers only start to bite above 10 TB, and the first tier is where almost everyone lives, so most accounts never see the discount. The practical effect is a variable cost you cannot cap, growing with your success rather than with your infrastructure.
Bundled allowances (Hetzner, DigitalOcean, Linode, OVHcloud)
Transfer comes with the server. You pay a flat monthly price, a large allowance is included, and overage is priced near cost. Most workloads never exceed the allowance at all, which makes the effective bandwidth bill zero. The trade is that the allowance is tied to the plans you run, and on several providers it is pooled across the account rather than reserved per machine.
Zero egress (Cloudflare R2)
Object storage with no egress fee at all, priced instead on stored bytes and per-operation charges. It is not a substitute for a server, but for the file-serving half of a workload it removes the line item entirely. That is the point of it: egress fees are what make leaving a cloud expensive, and pricing them at zero is a competitive lever rather than a cost breakthrough.
Ways to cut an egress bill
A cloud bill tells you the total, not the source. Per-server outbound traffic counters tell you which machine moved the bytes and when. A single misconfigured backup job or a hot-linked asset directory is a common cause of a bill that doubled for no visible reason.
Brotli or gzip on text responses typically removes 70 to 90% of the bytes. It is a config line on every reverse proxy, and egress is billed by the byte, so the saving is immediate and proportional.
Assets served with a long max-age and a content hash in the filename are fetched once per client instead of once per page view. Cheaper than a CDN, and often a bigger win.
Large static files (images, video, downloads, backups) are usually the bulk of egress. Serving them from zero-egress object storage while the application stays where it is cuts the metered volume without a migration.
Traffic between instances in the same zone over private addressing is usually free, while the same traffic over a public IP is billed as internet egress. Services reaching each other through their public endpoints is a quiet and expensive default.
On AWS, a NAT gateway adds a per-GB processing charge on top of egress, so private-subnet traffic to the internet is billed twice. VPC endpoints for S3 and DynamoDB remove that second charge for the traffic they cover.
Prices as of 9 September 2026
Cloud pricing changes without much warning. Every rate in this calculator is list price taken from the provider's own page, linked below. If a number here disagrees with the source, the source is right and this page is stale.
| Provider | Egress list price | What is modelled | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
|
AWS
EC2 data transfer out, US and EU regions
|
100 GB/month free, then $0.09/GB to 10 TB, $0.085/GB to 50 TB, $0.07/GB to 150 TB, $0.05/GB above | Standard internet egress from a US or EU region. The volume tiers are shared across services in the account, not per instance, so EC2 and S3 traffic in the same month counts toward one total. | Pricing page |
|
Google Cloud
Compute Engine, Premium Tier network
|
1 GB/month free, then $0.12/GB to 1 TB, $0.11/GB to 10 TB, $0.08/GB above | Premium Tier (the default), to destinations worldwide excluding China and Australia. Only 1 GB per month is free here, against 100 GB on AWS and Azure. Standard Tier is cheaper and includes 200 GiB free per region, in exchange for leaving Google's backbone earlier. | Pricing page |
|
Azure
Bandwidth, Zone 1 (North America, Europe)
|
100 GB/month free, then $0.087/GB to 10 TB, $0.083/GB to 50 TB, $0.07/GB to 150 TB, $0.05/GB above | Zone 1 (North America, Europe, UK). Zone 2 (Asia Pacific) and Zone 3 (South America, Africa, Middle East) are substantially more expensive on the same account. | Pricing page |
|
Hetzner Cloud
Cloud server, EU location
|
20 TB included per server, then EUR 1.00/TB | EU location, where every cloud server includes 20 TB. US locations include 1 TB and Singapore 0.5 TB, so a US fleet reaches overage far sooner. Overage is EUR 1.00/TB, converted here at 1 EUR = 1.08 USD. | Pricing page |
|
DigitalOcean
Droplets, pooled transfer
|
1 TB pooled allowance modelled, then $0.01/GiB | Modelled on the 1 TB allowance of an entry-level Droplet. Allowances pool across the team and grow with every Droplet you run, so a real fleet has more headroom than this and reaches overage later. DigitalOcean meters in binary GiB while this calculator works in decimal GB, so its figure runs about 7% high. | Pricing page |
|
Linode / Akamai
Compute instances, pooled transfer
|
1 TB pooled allowance modelled, then $0.005/GB | Modelled on the 1 TB allowance of an entry-level plan. Allowances pool across the account and grow with every instance. Distributed regions bill overage at $0.01/GB rather than $0.005/GB. | Pricing page |
|
OVHcloud
Public Cloud instances
|
Unlimited, no per-GB charge | Public Cloud instances include unlimited inbound and outbound traffic at no per-GB charge. Throughput is bounded by the instance's port speed rather than by monthly volume. | Pricing page |
|
Cloudflare R2
Object storage, zero egress fee
|
No egress charge at any volume | R2 charges nothing for egress at any volume. Storage ($0.015/GB/month) and per-operation charges still apply and are not modelled here. It serves files; it is not a server, so read it as the cost of moving the static half of a workload rather than as a like-for-like row. | Pricing page |
FAQ
How much does AWS charge for data transfer out? +
Which cloud provider has the cheapest bandwidth? +
Why is cloud egress so expensive? +
Is a GB of bandwidth the same as a GiB? +
Does this calculator cover inter-region transfer or CDN traffic? +
How do I find out how much bandwidth my servers actually use? +
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