Egress

Egress is the data your service sends to clients or other services. Bandwidth charges from cloud providers are almost always egress charges. Ingress (uploads, incoming requests) is free or near-free everywhere. This asymmetry shapes architecture. Storage providers like AWS S3, Google Cloud Storage, and Supabase Storage charge $0.05-0.12 per GB egress. Cloudflare R2 charges $0 for egress, which is why R2 is the indie answer for serving images, video, or downloadable files at scale. For free tiers, egress is the limiting unit. Supabase free gives 5 GB egress/month. Firebase free gives 10 GB. AWS Amplify gives 15 GB (first year) then 5 GB. The number to watch when choosing a backend for media: how many GB of egress per month does the free tier include? The structural reason cloud providers charge for egress is to keep customers locked in. Once your data lives in AWS S3 and your app reads it daily, moving to GCP costs the AWS egress bill plus the GCP ingress bill , often more than a year of usage at the new provider. R2's free egress is a deliberate market move against this structure.