Cloud egress fees create a hidden tax that penalizes companies for accessing their own data

AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud charge $0.05-$0.12 per GB for data egress while charging only $0.018-$0.023 per GB for storage, meaning it costs 4-6x more to retrieve data than to store it. Companies serving data-intensive workloads — such as a team serving 75 TB/month paying $6,750 in egress alone for just 5,000 users — face ballooning transfer costs that were invisible at the time of cloud adoption. Why it matters: companies cannot freely move or access their own data, so they avoid multi-cloud architectures and redundancy strategies, so they become more deeply locked into a single provider, so they lose negotiating leverage on all other cloud services, so they end up paying 30-50% more than necessary across their entire cloud bill over the lifetime of their infrastructure. The structural root cause is that cloud providers deliberately price egress high and ingress free to create an asymmetric cost trap — it is cheap to move data in but expensive to move it out, turning stored data into a de facto lock-in mechanism that compounds over time as data volumes grow.