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The actual cost of egress on AWS, Hetzner, OVH and Runpod

Egress is the hidden tax of the cloud. We modelled four real workloads against four providers.

Tobias 11 min read
  • guide
  • pricing
  • egress
  • aws
  • hetzner

Egress fees are the most-misunderstood line item in cloud billing. They’re rarely listed on the landing page, frequently miscalculated, and often the dominant cost once your traffic crosses a threshold.

The four workloads

We modelled: 1) a video CDN serving 50TB/mo, 2) an LLM API with 8TB/mo of token streaming, 3) a backup job pushing 12TB/mo to off-site, and 4) a static blog at 200GB/mo.

The numbers

AWS at $0.09/GB outbound puts the video CDN at ~$4,500/mo just for egress. The same workload on Hetzner Cloud is bundled (it’s free until you hit the 20TB cap, then €1/TB). On Runpod, $0.

For the static blog the math doesn’t matter — egress is a rounding error. For the LLM API, switching from AWS to a flat-fee provider saves four figures a month.

Rule of thumb

If your monthly egress is over 1TB and you’re on a hyperscaler, you are paying too much.

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