The $19K/Year Cloud Tax You're Probably Not Tracking: Egress, IPv4, and NAT Gateway Fees Compared

Cloud networking fees are the fastest-growing line item on enterprise cloud bills, and most teams don't see them coming. Networking-related charges — egress data transfer, public IPv4 addresses, and NAT Gateway processing — now represent a hidden ~18% tax on total cloud spend for organizations running multi-cloud or hybrid architectures. If you're coming from on-prem where bandwidth is essentially free, your architecture decisions could be costing tens of thousands per month in avoidable networking fees. Here's the full breakdown. Cloud Egress Fees: AWS vs Azure vs GCP All three hyperscalers charge asymmetrically — ingress is free, egress is not. Provider Free Tier First 1 TB 1–10 TB 10–50 TB 50–150 TB AWS 100 GB/mo $0.09/GB $0.09/GB $0.085/GB $0.07/GB Azure 100 GB/mo $0.087/GB $0.087/GB $0.083/GB $0.07/GB GCP 100 GB/mo $0.12/GB $0.08/GB $0.06/GB $0.04/GB The asymmetry is deliberate: free ingress + expensive egress creates vendor lock-in by making data extraction financially impractica