Last updated: June 2026
On egress pricing, OCI is dramatically cheaper than AWS and Azure. Oracle Cloud includes 10 TB of free outbound transfer per month and charges about $0.0085 per GB beyond it, while AWS gives 100 GB free then about $0.09 per GB and Azure gives 100 GB free then about $0.087 per GB. For data-heavy workloads OCI egress is roughly ten times cheaper at the first paid tier; for compute-bound workloads the difference rarely matters.
- OCI: 10 TB per month free, then about $0.0085 per GB.
- AWS: 100 GB per month free, then about $0.09 per GB at the first tier.
- Azure: 100 GB per month free, then about $0.087 per GB at the first tier.
- Egress only changes total cost for data-heavy workloads; for those, OCI wins decisively.
Egress, or data transfer out, is the charge a cloud applies when data leaves its network for the public internet. It is one of the least understood lines on a cloud bill and the place where OCI, AWS, and Azure differ most sharply. This article compares their internet egress pricing directly and is part of our Oracle Cloud cluster; the pillar it links up to is the complete guide to Oracle Cloud cost optimization. Understanding egress is a See step in our See, Cut, Lock, Run method: you cannot cut a cost you cannot see, and egress hides in aggregate.
Which cloud has the cheapest egress, OCI, AWS, or Azure?
OCI has the cheapest egress by a wide margin. As of June 2026, Oracle Cloud includes 10 TB of free outbound transfer per month per tenancy and charges about $0.0085 per GB beyond it, per the Oracle networking pricing page. AWS includes 100 GB of free internet egress per month and then charges about $0.09 per GB for the first 10 TB tier, per the AWS data transfer pricing. Azure includes 100 GB free per month and then charges about $0.087 per GB at the first tier, per Azure bandwidth pricing. Verify the current figures on each provider's page before acting, because data transfer rates and tier boundaries change.
| Cloud | Free egress per month | First paid-tier rate (per GB) | Volume discounting |
|---|---|---|---|
| OCI | 10 TB | ~$0.0085 | Already low; flat across most usage |
| AWS | 100 GB | ~$0.09 | Steps down at 10 TB, 50 TB, 150 TB tiers |
| Azure | 100 GB | ~$0.087 | Steps down toward $0.04 at 50 TB+ |
How much free egress does each cloud give per month?
OCI includes 10 TB of free internet egress per month, while AWS and Azure each include 100 GB. That is a hundredfold difference in the free band alone, and it is the reason OCI bills so rarely show a material egress line. A 100 GB allowance covers a small application or a low-traffic site, but any media delivery, analytics export, backup-to-internet, or busy API tier blows through it in days, at which point the AWS and Azure per-GB rates start to accumulate. The free allowance is the first thing to model when you compare clouds for a data-heavy workload, because it can be worth thousands of dollars a month on its own.
Is data transfer quietly inflating your cloud bill?
Our cloud cost audit maps where egress and inter-region transfer originate, models the cost across providers, and cuts the volume with caching, CDN, and architecture changes. On the performance model you pay only from realized savings. No savings, no fee.
Book a cost audit →Why is AWS and Azure egress so much more expensive than OCI?
AWS and Azure price egress as a premium service and discount it only at very high volume, whereas Oracle made cheap egress a deliberate competitive position. AWS charges about $0.09 per GB at the first paid tier and steps down at 10 TB, 50 TB, and 150 TB; Azure charges about $0.087 per GB and falls toward $0.04 per GB above 50 TB. Both still sit far above OCI's flat rate near $0.0085 per GB for the volumes most organizations actually move. The practical consequence is that on AWS and Azure, egress is something you actively engineer around with a CDN, caching, and keeping traffic inside the cloud's private network, while on OCI it is mostly a non-issue. If you run on Azure specifically, our Azure cluster guidance on Azure cost optimization covers the bandwidth and inter-region levers in depth.
Does egress pricing change the total cost of a cloud?
It depends entirely on the workload. For compute-bound or storage-bound applications, egress is a minor line and the egress gap between clouds barely moves the total. For content delivery, media streaming, large analytics exports, and multi-cloud architectures that constantly shuttle data out, egress can become one of the largest line items, and there OCI's pricing materially lowers total cost. The right approach is to measure your actual egress volume and pattern first, then decide whether it is large enough to influence a platform choice or whether the answer is simply to reduce the volume where you already run. The same hot-warm-cold and retrieval discipline that governs storage cost applies here; see our guide to reducing OCI object storage and archive costs for how tiering and retrieval interact with transfer.
Free allowances, per-GB rates, and tier boundaries reflect each provider as of June 2026. Verify current figures on the linked Oracle, AWS, and Azure documentation before acting, because data transfer pricing changes.
The OCI Cost Optimization Field Guide includes the egress modeling worksheet we use to compare data transfer cost across providers. It is the downloadable companion to this article.
Frequently asked questions
Which cloud has the cheapest egress, OCI, AWS, or Azure?
OCI has the cheapest egress by a wide margin. Oracle Cloud includes 10 TB of free outbound transfer per month and charges about $0.0085 per GB beyond it, while AWS includes 100 GB free then about $0.09 per GB and Azure includes 100 GB free then about $0.087 per GB. For egress-heavy workloads OCI is roughly ten times cheaper than AWS or Azure at the first paid tier. Verify current rates on each provider's pricing page.
How much free egress does each cloud give per month?
OCI includes 10 TB of free internet egress per month per tenancy, which is far larger than its rivals. AWS includes 100 GB of free internet egress per month across services, and Azure also includes 100 GB of free internet egress per month. The 100 GB allowances on AWS and Azure cover small workloads but are quickly exhausted by any data-heavy application.
Why is AWS and Azure egress so much more expensive than OCI?
AWS and Azure price internet egress at about $0.087 to $0.09 per GB at the first paid tier and discount only at very high volume, whereas Oracle made low egress a deliberate competitive position with a flat rate near $0.0085 per GB after a 10 TB free band. The result is that data transfer can be a major line item on AWS and Azure bills but is rarely material on OCI.
Does egress pricing change the total cost of a cloud?
It can, for data-heavy workloads. For compute or storage-bound applications egress is a minor line, but for content delivery, media, analytics export, and multi-cloud architectures that move large volumes out, egress can dominate the bill. In those cases OCI's pricing materially lowers total cost, while on AWS and Azure the right answer is usually a CDN, caching, and architecture changes that reduce egress volume.
The short version
OCI wins egress on price decisively: 10 TB free and about $0.0085 per GB against 100 GB free and about $0.09 on AWS and $0.087 on Azure. Whether that decides a platform depends on how much data you actually move out. When you want your egress mapped, modeled across providers, and reduced, that is exactly what our OCI cost optimization service delivers.
Cloud pricing and service behavior change frequently. Verify the specifics in this guide against the providers’ own current documentation and the FinOps Foundation: AWS pricing ↗, Azure pricing ↗, Oracle Cloud pricing ↗ and FinOps Foundation Framework ↗. This article also reflects Cloud Cost Room’s hands-on, vendor-neutral engagement experience.