Data Egress Fees: What Leaving a Cloud or SaaS Vendor Actually Costs

The UK's competition regulator found that fewer than 1% of cloud customers switch provider in a given year, and named egress fees as a key barrier. Here's what an egress fee actually is, what regulators forced providers to change between 2024 and 2027, and what the fee waivers still don't cover.

What an egress fee actually is

Cloud and SaaS providers generally don't charge you to move data in — "ingress" is typically free, because it's how they get your workload in the first place. Moving data out is a different story. An egress fee is a per-gigabyte charge for transferring data off a provider's infrastructure, whether that's to another cloud, to your own servers, or to a competing tool.

The rates are not trivial at scale. As of 2026, standard AWS S3 pricing gives the first 100GB of internet egress per month free in aggregate across services, then charges roughly $0.09/GB for the next 9.9TB, stepping down to about $0.085/GB, then $0.07/GB, and $0.05/GB at the highest volume tiers. Google Cloud and Azure have historically used comparable tiered structures. At those list rates, moving 50 terabytes out in a month costs roughly $4,400 in egress alone, and 500 terabytes roughly $29,000 — before any migration labor, dual-running costs, or the other categories in our hidden-costs framework are even counted.

It's the same mechanism our vendor lock-in piece calls "data lock-in" — except here it isn't a format problem or a missing export button. It's a line item on an invoice, and it scales directly with how much of your own data you're trying to take with you.

The evidence this is a real barrier, not just an annoyance

The UK Competition and Markets Authority's cloud services market investigation, which published its final decision on 31 July 2025, found that AWS and Microsoft each had a 30–40% share of supply in the UK market in 2024, and that fewer than 1% of customers switch provider each year. It named egress fees as "a key commercial barrier" that reduces customers' ability and incentive to switch or use more than one cloud, especially for smaller customers and those storing large amounts of data, alongside technical barriers such as limited interoperability.

That finding is specific to cloud infrastructure (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud), not SaaS applications generally. But most SaaS tools run on top of one of those three platforms, and any vendor offering to export a large media library, an activity log, or a backup archive on your behalf is, underneath, making the same egress-cost decision the CMA was investigating — whether or not that cost is itemized on your invoice.

What changed between 2024 and 2027

Regulatory and competitive pressure moved fast on this specific issue, compressing what would normally be a slow enterprise-infrastructure story into about three years:

Google Cloud announced in January 2024 that it would waive data-transfer fees for customers migrating all of their data off the platform. AWS followed in March 2024: customers moving off AWS can ask it for credits covering the data-transfer charges (TechCrunch). Microsoft added a comparable free-egress path for customers leaving Azure entirely, with a credit-application process for volumes above the standard 100GB monthly allowance (CIO Dive).

The EU's Data Act, in force since January 2024 and applicable from 12 September 2025, requires that during a transition period cloud switching and egress charges be strictly cost-covering rather than a lock-in mechanism — and from 12 January 2027, it bans switching charges and egress fees for cloud services outright, EU-wide. In the UK, the CMA's July 2025 final decision was followed by voluntary commitments from AWS and Microsoft, accepted on 31 March 2026, to lower egress fees, make switching easier and improve interoperability with other clouds, with the CMA reviewing progress after six months (Steptoe).

What the fee waivers still don't cover

None of this makes egress fees irrelevant to a switching-cost worksheet. A few gaps are worth checking before you assume you're covered:

• The waivers are full-exit programs, not partial-migration discounts. They're generally structured for customers leaving a cloud platform entirely, not for pulling one dataset out to switch a single SaaS tool that happens to run on that infrastructure.
• The SaaS layer doesn't automatically inherit the infrastructure-layer waiver. Your SaaS vendor may pay reduced or no egress cost to its own cloud provider, but that doesn't mean the export or migration-assistance fee it bills you is reduced to match — that's a separate commercial decision the vendor makes, often disclosed only in a professional-services quote at renewal.
• Not all data categories carry the same exposure. Ordinary transactional and CRM-style records are usually small enough that egress cost is negligible. Media libraries, activity logs, backups, and embeddings are the categories that actually generate a meaningful bill.
• Outside the UK and EU, these remain voluntary commercial policies, not law. A provider can narrow or change a free-exit program at any time in jurisdictions where no regulatory mandate applies yet.

Checking your own exposure

1. Ask directly whether your SaaS vendor passes through cloud egress cost in a migration-assistance or bulk-export fee, and get the number in writing before renewal — not after you've already given notice and lost your leverage.
2. Estimate your actual data footprint by category, not in aggregate. Media, backups, logs, and embeddings drive real egress bills; typical structured records usually don't.
3. If you're moving infrastructure directly (not just a SaaS layer on top of it), confirm in writing whether you qualify for a full-exit waiver, since the requirement is usually a complete departure rather than a partial transfer, and confirm the current transfer window and credit process, since AWS's, Azure's and Google's terms are not identical and the UK commitments may change them.
4. Treat published waivers as current policy, not permanent law, outside jurisdictions where a ban is already in force or firmly scheduled (the EU from January 2027) — reconfirm terms with the vendor before building a migration budget around them.
5. Add egress as its own line item in the same worksheet as the rest of your switching-cost estimate, rather than assuming it's bundled into a "migration fee" a vendor quotes you.

If the tool you're evaluating is an AI product specifically, egress isn't the only data-portability problem — fine-tunes, prompt history, and embeddings tied to one vector space often don't transfer at all, regardless of what the raw data costs to move. See our breakdown of what actually breaks when switching AI vendors for that layer.

Bottom line

Egress fees went from an under-the-radar line item to a specific target of UK and EU regulators inside about three years, and the direction of travel is toward eliminating them for full platform exits. That's real progress, but it applies most cleanly to leaving a cloud infrastructure provider outright — not necessarily to the SaaS export or migration-assistance fee sitting one layer up, which is where most switching decisions actually happen. Ask about it explicitly, in writing, before you're the one holding a bill you didn't budget for.