It’s the stuff of public cloud nightmares: Egress, ingress and other hidden fees that go bump in your budget

Like jump scares, the most frightening fees are those you don’t see coming

Taking the boo-factor out of your bill

The following scenario contains content that may not be suitable for budget-conscious companies. Reader discretion is advised:

Company X needs to store a petabyte of data in a public cloud. They budget $250,000 a year for that storage, but they don’t factor in how much they are going to touch that data—or how much that will cost them. When they open their invoice, they are horrified to find their API and egress charges are more than their storage costs. Their beloved budget has been crushed to bits.

A finance team fright fest 

The typical hyperscale cloud customer incurs 10–20% in unpredictable variable costs per month.² 

The frightening reality is that hyperscale cloud providers charge between 5 and 20 cents per GB each and every time you move your data from their cloud to your on-premises storage making it prohibitively expensive to get your data back out. Hyperscalers will also charge you to move your data to new geographical locations when you want to accelerate speeds for local users. 

Apple accelerated construction of its own data centers to reduce mounting AWS costs after it was charged almost $50 million in data transfer charges in one year. ³ 

While egress charges may not hurt the casual cloud user, larger organizations that push and pull terabytes of data from one of the big three public cloud providers end up locked into that cloud with an overblown invoice. What first appears to be bargain basement cloud prices can quickly turn into a money pit. 

So much for putting customers first.

Sweet dreams are made of no fees

Enterprise cloud spending is over budget by 24% on average. That’s not surprising when a typical hyperscale cloud customer incurs 10–20% in unpredictable variable costs per month. You can’t budget for what you don’t see coming—such as escalating egress fees. The cost to move 100 TB of data per month on one of the big three hyperscale clouds ranges from $2000 to $8000 in egress fees.⁵  The cost of moving 100 TB of data per month with ThinkOn? Nada. It’s your data. You should be able to get it back whenever you want it without paying ransom.

That’s putting customers first.

Read the full no egress fees data sheet: It’s the stuff of public cloud nightmares: Egress, ingress and other hidden fees that go bump in your budget.