Bandwidth Cost Calculator
Compare monthly data-transfer (egress) costs across 7 cloud providers. Enter your monthly outbound traffic and see who is cheapest — the difference is bigger than most teams expect.
At 2,000 GB/month, Hetzner is cheapest at $0.00/mo, while Google Cloud costs $228.00/mo — a difference of $228.00 every month.
Monthly Egress Cost by Provider
Understanding Cloud Bandwidth Costs
Data transfer is one of the most underestimated lines on a cloud bill. Inbound traffic is almost always free, but egress — data leaving the provider’s network — is metered, and the hyperscalers charge a premium for it. AWS, GCP, and Azure typically bill $0.08–0.12 per GB after a small 100 GB monthly free tier, which means a site serving a few terabytes of media or API responses can rack up hundreds of dollars in transfer fees alone.
The value-focused providers take the opposite approach. Hetzner includes 20 TB of traffic per server and charges a tiny fraction of a cent per GB beyond that. DigitalOcean, Vultr, and Linode bundle around 1 TB of transfer per instance and pool it across your fleet. For bandwidth-heavy workloads — streaming, downloads, image-heavy sites, or public APIs — this difference alone can justify choosing a provider, and it often dwarfs the compute cost.
If you must stay on a hyperscaler, the biggest lever is a CDN: caching static assets at the edge moves the bulk of egress off your origin and onto cheaper, cache-optimised transfer pricing. Compression, regional co-location, and avoiding unnecessary cross-region replication all help too. But for many teams, the simplest win is running egress-heavy services on a provider that includes generous bandwidth in the first place.
Cloud Bandwidth FAQ
What is cloud data egress and why does it cost so much?
Egress is data transferred out of a cloud provider’s network to the internet or another region. Hyperscalers like AWS, GCP, and Azure charge for egress (typically $0.08–0.12 per GB after a small free tier) because it is a major revenue line and a soft form of lock-in. Inbound (ingress) data is almost always free.
Which cloud provider has the cheapest bandwidth?
For bandwidth-heavy workloads, Hetzner is dramatically cheaper — it includes 20 TB per server and charges roughly $0.0012 per GB beyond that. DigitalOcean, Vultr, and Linode include around 1 TB per instance and charge about $0.005–0.01 per GB after. AWS, GCP, and Azure are the most expensive once you exceed their 100 GB free tier.
How can I reduce my cloud bandwidth bill?
Use a CDN to cache and serve static assets, compress responses, keep traffic within the same region where possible, and choose a provider with generous included bandwidth. For sites and apps that push a lot of data, moving egress-heavy workloads to Hetzner, Vultr, or DigitalOcean can cut transfer costs by 90% or more versus the hyperscalers.
Does this include CDN or inter-region transfer costs?
No — this estimate models standard data-transfer-out to the internet. CDN pricing, cross-region replication, and inter-availability-zone transfer are billed separately and vary by provider. Treat the figure as a baseline for public egress.
Is inbound data also charged?
In almost all cases, inbound (ingress) data transfer into the cloud is free across AWS, GCP, Azure, and the VPS providers. The cost you need to plan for is egress — data leaving the provider’s network.
Cut Your Bandwidth Bill
Browse Hetzner, Vultr, and DigitalOcean accounts with generous included bandwidth — delivered in hours.
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