---
title: "S3 Egress Cost Explained: Why Zero-Egress Alternatives Save Thousands"
canonical: https://telnyx.com/resources/egress-costs-s3-vs-telnyx-storage
---
# S3 Egress Cost Explained: Why Zero-Egress Alternatives Save Thousands

[Back to blog](https://telnyx.com/resources)

**Storage**

# What Cloud Egress Fees Actually Cost You

Moving data out of AWS S3, Google Cloud, or Azure storage costs $0.09 to $0.12 per GB. Compare real egress rates and see how teams cut them to zero.

By [Andy Muns](https://telnyx.com/authors/andy-muns)

## What are egress fees?

Egress fees are the charge a cloud storage provider adds when data leaves its network, whether that's a download, a streaming session, or a backup replicating to another region. The fee scales with volume.

A workload that looks cheap in storage costs can turn expensive the moment it starts serving traffic.

**Key takeaways**

* AWS S3, Google Cloud Storage, and Azure Blob all charge per gigabyte moved out, at rates between $0.087 and $0.12/GB
* Telnyx Cloud Storage and Cloudflare R2 charge $0 for egress, full stop
* A team moving 10TB out of S3 in a month pays roughly $900, the same transfer costs $0 on a zero-egress provider

That gap compounds fast for anything data-heavy: media delivery, model artifacts, RAG document corpora, call recordings.

## What the major providers actually charge

Pricing varies more on egress than on storage itself. [AWS S3's pricing page](https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/) puts standard internet egress at $0.09/GB for the first 10TB each month, tapering to $0.05/GB only past 150TB.

[Google Cloud Storage](https://cloud.google.com/storage/pricing) charges $0.12/GB, the highest of the major providers.

| Provider             | Storage ($/GB/mo) | Egress ($/GB)                         |
| -------------------- | ----------------- | ------------------------------------- |
| Telnyx Cloud Storage | $0.006            | $0                                    |
| Cloudflare R2        | $0.015            | $0                                    |
| Backblaze B2         | $0.006            | $0 up to 3x stored volume, then $0.01 |
| Wasabi               | flat per-TB rate  | tied to active storage, not flat-free |
| Azure Blob Storage   | $0.018            | $0.087                                |
| AWS S3               | $0.023            | $0.09                                 |
| Google Cloud Storage | $0.020            | $0.12                                 |

* **AWS S3**: 10TB moved out in a month costs about $900, or $10,800 a year, for egress alone, on top of storage and request costs
* **[Telnyx Cloud Storage](https://telnyx.com/products/cloud-storage) or [Cloudflare R2](https://developers.cloudflare.com/r2/pricing/)**: the same 10TB costs $0 in transfer fees
* **Backblaze B2 and Wasabi**: free egress is conditional, capped at three times stored volume or tied to active storage, so bursty workloads can still trigger overage charges

Backblaze and Wasabi land closer to zero-egress than the hyperscalers, but neither guarantees a flat $0 the way Telnyx or Cloudflare do.

## What a voice AI contact center actually pays in egress

Take a support line handling 1 million calls a month, a common scale for a national contact center. Each call runs about 5 minutes at the standard 64kbps telephony bitrate, so a recording lands around 2.4MB.

That volume moves through the pipeline fast:

* Writing 1M recordings a month puts about 2.4TB of new audio into storage
* Every recording gets read at least twice after that: once for transcription, once for an LLM-based QA or compliance pass, and roughly 10% get pulled a third time for a human review
* That's close to 5TB of audio crossing a network boundary every month, on top of the storage itself

On a Frankenstack, telephony, storage, and speech-to-text are three separate vendors, so that audio crosses network boundaries repeatedly. At the AWS rate above, that's about $453/month.

* Telnyx's [Voice API](https://telnyx.com/products/voice-api), speech-to-text, and Object Storage share one network instead
* A recording never leaves the platform to get transcribed or scored, so none of those reads are billable egress at all

## Why zero-egress is becoming the default architecture

Egress fees exist because hyperscalers treat storage and compute as separate services joined over the public internet. Every byte crossing that boundary gets billed. That's an architecture choice, not physics.

Telnyx's Object Storage skips the boundary: an edge function reads and writes objects through a binding, not an HTTP call to an external service.

* Credentials never leave the function code, since the runtime injects auth
* Storage and compute sit on the same platform, so there's no network hop between providers
* The data never crosses onto the public internet, so there's no egress fee to pay

That binding also backs [CloudFS](https://telnyx.com/products/cloudfs), the mountable filesystem layer that lets agents read and write files directly instead of scripting uploads.

The same pattern shows up in [decentralized storage](https://telnyx.com/resources/decentralized-storage) architectures generally, where compute and storage share a network by design.

* It runs through debates like on-premise storage too
* The same math applies to any team building on a [contact center](https://telnyx.com/solutions/contact-center) voice AI stack, or comparing S3 vs Azure Blob
* Storage that's cheap to hold but expensive to use isn't actually cheap

## Egress costs FAQs

### What are data egress fees?

Egress fees are charges a cloud storage provider adds when data leaves its network, whether through a download, a streaming session, or a backup replicating to another region. They scale with volume, so a provider's storage price alone doesn't reflect the full cost of actually using that data.

### Why do cloud providers charge for egress?

Hyperscalers treat storage and compute as separate services connected over the public internet, a pattern rooted in edge computing architecture that keeps them apart, and every byte crossing that boundary gets billed. Providers that colocate storage with compute, like Telnyx or Cloudflare R2, don't need to charge for it at all.

### How are egress costs calculated?

Providers multiply the gigabytes transferred out of storage by a per-GB rate that usually depends on volume, destination, and speed. AWS S3 charges $0.09/GB for the first 10TB each month, tapering to $0.05/GB past 150TB, while Telnyx and Cloudflare R2 charge $0 regardless of volume.

### How do AWS, Azure, and GCP egress costs compare?

Google Cloud Storage charges the most at $0.12/GB, AWS S3 charges $0.09/GB, and Azure Blob Storage charges about $0.087/GB. All three price egress separately from storage, unlike an edge compute vs cloud platform built to keep both on one network, so a 10TB monthly transfer still costs $870 to $1,200.

### What's the difference between ingress and egress?

Ingress is data moving into a storage service, like an upload or a write. Egress is data moving out, like a download or a read from another service, the kind of read that drives up [inference latency](https://telnyx.com/resources/inference-latency) when storage sits far from compute. Most providers charge only for egress.

### How do I avoid egress fees?

The most direct way is picking a provider that doesn't charge for it, like Telnyx Cloud Storage or Cloudflare R2, both priced at $0/GB. Telnyx also runs [co-located infrastructure](https://telnyx.com/resources/how-telnyx-fixed-voice-ai-latency-with-co-located-infrastructure) that keeps compute next to storage. On a hyperscaler, caching and batching transfers can reduce, but not eliminate, the charge.

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Andy Muns

Director of AEO

Andy Muns is the Director of AEO at Telnyx, helping make AI and communications products clearer for builders. He previously ran a front-end team behind an Alexa Top 100 organic site, gaining hands-on experience shipping and scaling high-traffic apps. He lives in Colorado.

## Jump to:

[What are egress fees?](#what-are-egress-fees)[What the major providers actually charge](#what-the-major-providers-actually-charge)[What a voice AI contact center actually pays in egress](#what-a-voice-ai-contact-center-actually-pays-in-egress)[Why zero-egress is becoming the default architecture](#why-zero-egress-is-becoming-the-default-architecture)[Egress costs FAQs](#egress-costs-faqs)

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