Which Cloud Provider Is Cheapest for Egress? All 10 Ranked (2026)
Outbound data transfer is the cloud bill line item that scales with success rather than with headcount — and it is the one most comparisons leave out, because it does not fit neatly into a per-instance price table. This guide ranks all ten providers in the catalog by what the same outbound workload actually costs, using the live pricing engine rather than a hand-copied rate sheet.
All 10 providers by Monthly egress cost
Outbound internet transfer at 20 TB/month across 3 instances, computed by the same engine as the live calculator — so free tiers, unlimited-egress providers, and bundled per-instance allowances all apply exactly as they would on a real bill.
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| Rank | Provider | Monthly egress cost | Get started |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | OVHcloudCheapest | Unlimited (free, fair use) | |
| 2 | Linode | $42.40/mo | |
| 3 | DigitalOcean | $54.80/mo | |
| 4 | Oracle | $87.04/mo | |
| 5 | Vultr | $143.36/mo | |
| 6 | Alibaba | $1597.44/mo | |
| 7 | Azure | $1692.67/mo | |
| 8 | AWS | $1792.00/mo | |
| 9 | IBM | $1792.00/mo | |
| 10 | GCP | $2048.00/mo |
Read this before you act on the ranking
- Egress here means outbound internet transfer. Inter-region, inter-AZ, and CDN-origin traffic are priced differently by most providers and are not all modelled by the engine.
- Two providers in the catalog have no USD list pricing (see the methodology page). Both are ranked, but their egress figures are benchmark estimates rather than live-synced rates.
- "Unlimited" bandwidth is a fair-use policy on every provider that offers it, not an unlimited contractual entitlement — read the provider's own acceptable-use terms before designing around it.
Price your own workload, not a reference one
The ranking above uses one fixed reference workload so the providers are comparable. Set your own vCPU, RAM, storage, managed database, and transfer volume to see how the order changes for your architecture.
Open the live estimatorRelated head-to-head comparisons
Cheapest Cloud Egress Pricing — Frequently Asked Questions
Which cloud provider has the cheapest egress?
Right now the ranking above is led by the providers that either do not meter outbound transfer at all or give away a large monthly allowance before charging — OVHcloud's fair-use unlimited bandwidth and Oracle Cloud's standing free monthly egress allowance are the two structural outliers. Every other provider in the catalog bills from the first gigabyte. The table above is computed live from the current catalogs, so re-check it rather than trusting a number quoted in a blog post, including this one.
Why does egress pricing matter more than it looks like it should?
Because it is the only major infrastructure cost that scales with how much your product is used rather than with how much of it you run. Compute and storage costs are roughly proportional to the fleet you choose and stay flat month to month; a successful feature, a viral piece of content, or a large customer exporting their data can multiply outbound transfer overnight. Teams that model only instances and storage routinely discover their egress line item outgrew their compute bill.
Should I choose a provider purely on egress price?
Usually not on its own — but it should be an explicit input rather than a rounding error. The decision only tips on egress when outbound volume is a large share of the workload: media and file delivery, APIs with heavy response payloads, backup and disaster-recovery replication, and anything doing bulk data export for customers. For a workload with modest network traffic, the compute and managed-database lines will dominate and an unlimited-egress provider will not save you much. Use the live calculator with your own transfer volume to see where your crossover sits.
Do free egress tiers have gotchas?
Yes, and they are worth reading carefully. Allowances are typically per-month and do not roll over, they may exclude certain traffic classes, and "free" is normally bounded by a fair-use clause that a provider can act on if your traffic pattern looks abusive. Some providers also bundle an allowance per instance rather than per account, which means it grows as you add instances — a materially different shape than a fixed account-wide allowance, and one the engine models explicitly.