# Egress fees explained: what they are and how to avoid them in 2026

Last updated: 2026-11-10

Egress fees are what a cloud or hosting provider charges for data leaving its network: every page, image, API response or file download your visitors receive. Incoming traffic is usually free, so the bill grows with what you send out. You avoid most of it by caching and compressing what you serve, keeping heavy downloads on storage with no egress fee, and choosing a host that includes traffic in a fixed price, such as **Hetzner**, **OVHcloud**, **Sliplane** or **Eurobase**.

## Egress pricing at a glance

| Platform | Included each month | Price beyond that | What it applies to |
|---|---|---|---|
| Eurobase | No per-GB traffic charge | No usage charges today | App responses; file storage has its own monthly transfer allowance |
| AWS | 100 GB, shared across all services and regions | $0.09 per GB for the first 10 TB from Frankfurt, falling to $0.05 above 150 TB | Data from EC2 and other services to the internet |
| Vercel | 100 GB of Fast Data Transfer on Hobby | Pro lists a Flat Rate CDN; on-demand rates start at $0.15 per GB and vary by region | CDN to visitor, plus Fast Origin Transfer at $0.06 per GB |
| Netlify | Paid from your monthly credits | 20 credits per GB | Web and database bandwidth |
| Render | 5 GB on Hobby, 25 GB on Pro, 1 TB on Scale | $0.15 per GB | Bandwidth from web services and sites |
| Cloudflare | Workers: no egress charge. R2: free egress | Not charged | Workers responses and R2 downloads |
| Hetzner | 20 TB or more per cloud server in EU locations | €1 per TB excl. VAT | Outgoing traffic only |
| OVHcloud | Unlimited traffic on VPS outside Asia-Pacific | Not charged; speed capped at 500 Mbps on VPS-1 | VPS public traffic |
| Sliplane | Free egress under a fair use policy | Not charged | Traffic from your server |
| Impossible Cloud | No egress or API fees | €7.99 per TB stored a month | S3-compatible object storage |

Prices are from each provider's own page, checked on 9 and 10 November 2026. Dollar prices are in USD as the provider lists them.

## What counts as egress

- **To the internet.** The usual meaning: bytes your app or bucket sends to browsers, phones and other services outside the provider. This is the line that grows with your traffic.
- **Between regions.** Big clouds also bill traffic between their own regions. With a database in one region and the app in another, every query result counts.
- **Between products.** Vercel bills Fast Origin Transfer for data moving between its CDN and your functions, on top of what the CDN sends to the visitor.
- **What's usually free.** Inbound traffic. Hetzner also treats traffic between its own servers in the same network zone as internal and free.

## What 1 TB of downloads a month costs

A worked example with list prices, before any plan fee or VAT.

| Platform | Calculation | Traffic cost |
|---|---|---|
| AWS, Frankfurt | 1,000 GB minus 100 GB free, at $0.09 | About $81 |
| Render Pro | 1,000 GB minus 25 GB included, at $0.15 | About $146 |
| Netlify | 1,000 GB at 20 credits per GB | 20,000 credits, the size of the largest Pro tier and almost seven times the 3,000-credit entry tier |
| Hetzner cloud server | Inside the 20 TB included | €0 |
| Cloudflare Workers | No egress charge | $0 |
| Eurobase | Response traffic has no plan allowance or per-GB price | €0 above the plan price, unless the bytes come from file storage, whose monthly allowance tops out at 500 GiB on Pro |

In a month with ten times the traffic, metered rates multiply too. For how each pricing model handles a spike, see [flat or usage-based hosting](/i/flat-vs-usage-based-hosting-pricing).

## What to check before you pick a host

- **Whether traffic is metered at all.** Some hosts include it in a server or plan price. Others bill each gigabyte. Find the line on the pricing page that grows with visitors.
- **What happens past the included amount.** Hetzner bills overage in 100 MB blocks and says its 75% and 100% notifications don't cap or stop usage. A platform that refuses work at a limit behaves differently from one that keeps serving and invoices you.
- **The fair use clause.** "Free egress" often comes with a fair use policy. Read it against your pattern, especially if you serve video or large downloads.
- **The cost of leaving.** Moving terabytes out of a cloud is itself egress. AWS waives that charge for customers leaving, but you have to ask AWS Support first.

## How to cut egress on any host

1. **Cache in front of your app.** Give hashed assets a long lifetime and let a CDN or shared cache keep public pages. Each cache hit at the edge is a byte your origin doesn't send. Our [HTTP caching guide](/i/http-caching-for-web-apps) lists the headers.
2. **Compress text.** Serve HTML, CSS, JavaScript and JSON with Brotli or gzip.
3. **Shrink images.** Resize to the size you display and serve modern formats.
4. **Move large files to storage without download fees.** Cloudflare R2, Impossible Cloud and OVHcloud Object Storage list no egress fees. See [R2 alternatives in Europe](/i/cloudflare-r2-alternatives-europe) and [object storage in Europe](/i/european-object-storage).
5. **Keep traffic inside one network.** Put the app, database and bucket in the same provider and region so internal traffic stays free or cheap.
6. **Stop traffic you don't want.** Bots, scrapers and hotlinked images all count as egress. Block them before they reach your origin.
7. **Set an alert or a cap.** On metered plans, turn on spend notifications and, where offered, a hard limit.

## Where each option fits

### Eurobase

Eurobase, registered in Warsaw, Poland, builds your app from Git and serves it on European infrastructure run by Scaleway, a French provider. You pay one flat plan for the workspace, and the responses your apps send carry no separate traffic allowance and no per-gigabyte price.

- **Best for:** web apps where you want the monthly bill fixed before traffic arrives.
- **Price:** a Free plan, then Starter at €10 and Pro at €20 a month + VAT. File storage includes 25 GiB of transfer a month on Free, 100 GiB on Starter and 500 GiB on Pro. There are no usage charges today: work over a limit is refused, apps on V8 isolates and Functions stop until the monthly reset, and containers and static sites keep serving.
- **What it lacks:** an S3-compatible API for its storage, managed Postgres, MySQL or Redis, and preview deployments. ISO 27001 and SOC 2 are being worked towards, and neither is held today.

### Hetzner

A German host whose cloud servers include at least 20 TB of outgoing traffic a month in EU locations, with incoming and internal traffic free. Servers are listed from €5.49 a month excl. VAT, but the cheapest plans showed as unavailable to order on 10 November 2026.

- **Best for:** teams willing to run their own server who send a lot of data.
- **Price:** overage at €1 per TB once the included traffic is used.
- **What it lacks:** a managed platform. Updates, backups and deployments are yours.

### OVHcloud

The French provider's VPS range includes unlimited traffic, with VPS-1 from €3.81 a month excl. VAT at 500 Mbps of public bandwidth. In Mumbai, Singapore and Sydney a monthly quota applies, after which speed drops to 10 Mbps.

- **Best for:** steady, heavy traffic on a server you manage.
- **What it lacks:** speed beyond the plan's bandwidth, and a managed deploy flow on the VPS itself.

### Sliplane

A Berlin company that builds your app or runs your image on servers you rent through it. Egress is free under its fair use policy, and servers start at €9 excl. VAT.

- **Best for:** Docker apps where you'd rather pay per server than per gigabyte.
- **What it lacks:** an unlimited promise. The fair use policy sets the boundary.

### Cloudflare

A US company. Workers carry no extra charge for egress or bandwidth, and R2 storage has free egress, with fees for storage and operations instead.

- **Best for:** apps and files where download volume is the main cost.
- **Price:** Workers Paid is $5 a month for the account, plus usage over the included amounts. R2 Standard storage is $0.015 per GB a month.
- **What it lacks:** a European company behind the contract, if your customers require one.

## Frequently asked questions

### What does egress mean in cloud pricing?

It's data leaving the provider's network, usually to the internet. When a visitor loads your page or downloads a file, those bytes are egress. Data you upload to the provider is ingress and is almost always free.

### Why is egress so expensive on AWS?

It's priced per gigabyte on a sliding scale. From Frankfurt, after the first 100 GB a month, AWS charges $0.09 per GB for the first 10 TB, so 1 TB costs about $81 on top of compute and storage. Hosts that include traffic in a server or plan price spread the cost differently.

### Which hosts don't charge egress fees?

Cloudflare doesn't charge for Workers egress or R2 downloads. Impossible Cloud and OVHcloud list no egress fees for their object storage. Sliplane includes egress under fair use, OVHcloud VPS plans include unlimited traffic outside Asia-Pacific, and Eurobase doesn't bill traffic by the gigabyte.

### Do I pay egress when I leave a cloud provider?

Normally yes, because moving your data out is outbound traffic. AWS waives it for customers leaving if you contact AWS Support first; outside the EU you then have 180 days to finish, and EU customers switching under the EU Data Act follow a separate addendum. Our [S3 migration guide](/i/aws-s3-alternatives-europe) covers the steps.

### Does Eurobase charge for bandwidth?

No. Plans are flat, with no per-gigabyte traffic charge and no usage charges today. App responses have no separate traffic allowance. File storage downloads count against a monthly transfer allowance, listed on [Plans and limits](/docs/plans), and work over a limit is refused rather than billed.

## Sources

- [AWS EC2 on-demand pricing, data transfer](https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/on-demand/) and [AWS price list for data transfer, EU Frankfurt](https://pricing.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/offers/v1.0/aws/AWSDataTransfer/current/eu-central-1/index.json)
- [AWS: free data transfer out when moving out of AWS](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/free-data-transfer-out-to-internet-when-moving-out-of-aws/)
- [Vercel pricing](https://vercel.com/pricing) and [Vercel CDN pricing and usage](https://vercel.com/docs/manage-cdn-usage)
- [How Netlify credits work](https://docs.netlify.com/manage/accounts-and-billing/billing/billing-for-credit-based-plans/how-credits-work/)
- [Render pricing](https://render.com/pricing)
- [Cloudflare Workers pricing](https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/platform/pricing/) and [Cloudflare R2 pricing](https://developers.cloudflare.com/r2/pricing/)
- [Hetzner Cloud billing FAQ](https://docs.hetzner.com/cloud/billing/faq/) and [Hetzner traffic](https://docs.hetzner.com/robot/general/traffic/)
- [OVHcloud VPS](https://www.ovhcloud.com/en-ie/vps/) and [OVHcloud Object Storage](https://www.ovhcloud.com/en-ie/public-cloud/object-storage/)
- [Sliplane pricing](https://sliplane.io/pricing)
- [Impossible Cloud pricing](https://www.impossiblecloud.com/pricing)
- [Eurobase pricing](/pricing) and [Eurobase plans and limits](/docs/plans)