That’s the moment you realize the biggest barrier to cloud mobility isn’t technology. It’s the toll booth on the way out. Hyperscalers built their business on getting your data cheaply (or free) and charging you dearly to get it out. And the bigger you grow, the higher the toll.
Akave Cloud was built to break that model.
The Hotel California Problem
Data egress is just a fancy way of saying “what you pay to move your own data out of someone else’s cloud.” Ingress is usually free, because they want you inside. But getting out? Think Hotel California: you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave, without paying up.
On AWS, Azure, or GCP, egress averages around $0.09 per GB after your first 100 GB. That means moving just 10 TB can cost you about $900… every month.
Gartner estimates egress can eat 10–15% of your total cloud bill and in some cases, those fees have risen to 40% of total cloud spend.
According to Sid Nag, VP in Gartner’s Technology and Service Provider Group, full exits (moving all your data out at once) are a small fraction of the market. The real costs come from data moving between multiple clouds in day-to-day operations.
As Gartner’s September 2023 report, cited by Fierce Network, explained, even something as simple as “putting a web file into an object storage bucket from one of the major hyperscalers and then serving it back out to internet users” can cost up to four times the plain storage costs.
Infrastructure costs has gone down while hyperscalers have kept prices consistent
- Storage unit pricing has continuously dropped in $/TB
- Hyperscaler prices have stayed the same for the last 8 years
During the same period of time, from 2016 to today, the cloud storage costs remain unchanged, with Amazon S3 charging $23 per TB over the last 8 years.
On top of this, cloud providers easily get 20-25% extra discounts vs. channel based disk prices, so the above pricing of $11/TB is closer to $8-$8.5/TB.
Multi-Cloud Is the Norm and So Are Hidden Transfer Costs
Multi-cloud isn’t a niche, it’s the default. 92% of large enterprises are already multi-cloud, often blending public and private environments for compliance, cost, and performance
The reasons are obvious: no single hyperscaler fits every workload. AI pipelines might run best in one cloud, compliance archives in another, and global content delivery in a third.
But here’s the problem: every hop between clouds is metered. AWS, Azure, and GCP all charge between $0.01 and $0.09 per GB for cross-region or cross-cloud transfers. These aren’t “exit fees” in the traditional sense, they’re everyday workflow penalties.
The Cloud Cost Crunch
Cloud spending is no longer an afterthought, it’s one of the biggest operational expenses for modern businesses. According to the CloudZero “State of Cloud Cost” report, more than 50% of companies now spend over $2 million annually on cloud infrastructure, with storage, compute, and data transfer fees making up the majority of that spend.
An IDC report found that 45% of organizations have repatriated some workloads back on-prem or to alternate providers in the last 12 months, often citing unpredictable data movement costs and egress pricing as primary drivers.
While compute costs dominate early-stage workloads, data transfer charges scale disproportionately as companies grow, turning into one of the least predictable and most frustrating parts of the bill.
For companies pursuing AI, multi-cloud, or global distribution strategies, these costs aren’t just line items, they’re strategic blockers. That’s where Akave’s fixed-pricing model changes the game.
“Free Egress Fees”: The Fine Print
You may have seen recent press releases about “free egress” from the big three.
Sounds great, until you read the terms:
- AWS: 100 GB free per month, possible credits if you file a request and get approved
- Google Cloud: Waives fees only if you permanently close your account and move all data within 60 days.
- Azure: Same forced-shutdown policy as Google.
Oracle summed it up best: don’t be fooled by marketing language; these waivers are retention tactics, not true mobility policies.
If you want to move data between clouds for multi-cloud resilience, or stream content to a partner platform while keeping a copy in your main cloud, you’re still paying the toll every time.
Akave Cloud: Multi-Cloud Without the Penalty
Most cloud providers quietly profit from constraining your choices. Their egress models make you think twice before moving workloads or sharing data outside their ecosystem.
Akave Cloud takes the opposite approach: we don’t want to constrain how or where you use your data.
- Flat $14.99/TB/month; unlimited transfers, no per-GB egress.
- Cloud-agnostic architecture; works alongside any public or private cloud.
- Built for movement; sync between clouds, move workloads for AI training, or stream to the edge without worrying about transfer bills.
Instead of penalizing mobility, we make it a feature. That means you can design your architecture for what’s best for the business, not what’s cheapest to move.
Say you store 10 TB with Akave Cloud:
- Hyperscaler: $900/month in egress fees alone if you move that data once. Move it multiple times and the costs multiply.
- Akave Cloud: $149.90/month flat, storage + unlimited egress included.
Scale that to 100 TB/month, and you’re talking $9,000 in avoidable egress spend with a hyperscaler vs $1,499 flat with Akave. Over a year, that’s $90,000+ saved.
When you strip out the penalty fees, you gain more than cost savings, you gain freedom.
- Shift AI training data to faster and more cost efficient compute environments on demand.
- Negotiate better deals for compute and cloud services, rather than being locked-in
- Keep live datasets in multiple regions without worrying about transfer bills.
- Run backups and disaster recovery drills as often as you need.
With Akave Cloud, you stop optimizing for “cheapest to move” and start optimizing for “best for the business.”
Check out how Akave Cloud can help you save on your Egress Fees with our Storage pricing calculator.
Data Freedom Without the Egress Fees
Egress fees aren’t just a line item, they’re a strategy tax. They limit your ability to negotiate, innovate, and adapt when markets change. Akave Cloud removes that tax. Whether you’re running AI pipelines, streaming workloads, or compliance-heavy datasets, you can store, move, and monetize your data without fear of a surprise bill waiting on the other side.
Connect with Us
Akave Cloud is an enterprise-grade, distributed and scalable object storage designed for large-scale datasets in AI, analytics, and enterprise pipelines. It offers S3 object compatibility, cryptographic verifiability, immutable audit trails, and SDKs for agentic agents; all with zero egress fees and no vendor lock-in saving up to 80% on storage costs vs. hyperscalers.
Akave Cloud works with a wide ecosystem of partners operating hundreds of petabytes of capacity, enabling deployments across multiple countries and powering sovereign data infrastructure. The stack is also pre-qualified with key enterprise apps such as Snowflake and others.
Sources:
- Spacelift.io : 55 Cloud Computing Statistics for 2025
- Gartner: Deciphering Cloud Egress Charges: Navigating Complexity to Minimize Cloud Investments
- Cloudzero: State Of Cloud Costs in 2024
- IDC: Worldwide Spending on Public Cloud Services
- Fierce-network: Conversation About Egress fees far over