Real cost scenarios for UK small and medium businesses across AWS, Azure and GCP. The tiered pricing nobody reads in full, the alternatives that pay back, and the back-of-envelope numbers Finance is actually trying to nail down at the end of each quarter. Published openly so the rest of the industry can use it.
Cloud egress is the line item that surprises UK SMEs most often, because the pricing is tiered, the free tier expires, and the bill scales with success in a way that catches finance off guard. We publish this report quarterly to give UK SMEs honest, current numbers, expressed in scenarios that look like real businesses rather than press-release marketing.
The data behind the scenarios comes from public AWS, Azure and GCP pricing pages as of the report date, cross-checked against the calculations behind egresscost.com, which is a free public cloud egress calculator we maintain. The cost ranges and recommendations also draw on what we see in real client engagements.
All three hyperscalers use tiered pricing for outbound data transfer to the public internet. The first 100 GB per month is free across the board (this was introduced industry-wide in 2024 in response to regulatory and competitive pressure). Above that, the prices kick in and scale down by tier.
| Provider | First 10 TB / month | Next 40 TB | Next 100 TB | Above 150 TB |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| AWS (US/EU regions, to public internet) | $0.090 / GB | $0.085 / GB | $0.070 / GB | $0.050 / GB |
| Azure (Zone 1) | $0.087 / GB | $0.083 / GB | $0.070 / GB | $0.050 / GB |
| GCP (Standard tier, North America/Europe) | $0.085 / GB | $0.082 / GB | $0.060 / GB | $0.044 / GB |
| Cloudflare R2 | $0.000 / GB | $0.000 / GB | $0.000 / GB | $0.000 / GB |
| Backblaze B2 | $0.010 / GB | $0.010 / GB | $0.010 / GB | $0.010 / GB |
A few things to note about that table. First, the published prices are in USD across all five providers, which adds an FX layer to UK SME budgeting that nobody enjoys. Second, the differences between AWS, Azure and GCP are real but small at SME scale, typically under £150 per month difference on a 5 TB workload. Third, the gap between the hyperscalers and the no-egress alternatives is enormous, easily 90 percent of the bill for the workloads where egress dominates.
At 5 TB monthly outbound, the workload sits comfortably inside the first tier of every hyperscaler. AWS: roughly $440 per month. Azure: roughly $425. GCP: roughly $418. The differences are well under the FX noise on a UK invoice.
On Cloudflare R2 this workload would cost £0 in egress (storage and operations costs apply but are an order of magnitude smaller). Total cloud spend reduction: ~£300 to £350 per month, ~£3,800 a year. Worth doing if the workload is portable and the rest of your infrastructure does not depend on AWS-specific services.
At 25 TB, the workload crosses the first tier break on AWS and Azure. AWS: roughly $2,180 per month. Azure: roughly $2,110. GCP: roughly $2,015. The hyperscaler-to-hyperscaler difference is now ~$170 per month, which is real money to a UK SME but not enough alone to justify a migration.
On Cloudflare R2 or via a Cloudflare CDN in front of AWS S3, this workload egress cost approaches zero. A purist switch saves ~£1,700 per month, ~£20,000 per year, which is a substantial chunk of an SME tech budget. We see this pattern repeatedly: businesses that did not realise their bill was dominated by egress until they ran the calculation, then saved more in twelve months than the migration cost to execute.
At 100 TB, the workload crosses two tier breaks. AWS: roughly $7,940 per month. Azure: roughly $7,720. GCP: roughly $7,290. The GCP advantage compounds at this scale, but the hyperscaler-to-hyperscaler gap is still under 10 percent.
At this scale the question is no longer whether to optimise egress, it is how. The honest options are: a CDN in front of the hyperscaler (Cloudflare, Fastly, Bunny) reduces egress by 60 to 85 percent and keeps the rest of the architecture intact. Moving cold-storage to R2 or B2 while keeping hot-path on the hyperscaler is the most common pattern. A full migration is rare and tends to be driven by architectural change rather than cost alone.
The headline change versus 2025 is that AI workloads have entered the cloud-cost conversation for mainstream UK SMEs. A business delivering AI-generated content, voice or analytics to end users is now egressing meaningfully more than the same business was 12 months ago, often by a factor of three or four. Finance teams who set the cloud budget in early 2025 are now finding it broken for reasons no one anticipated.
The second change is that Cloudflare R2 has crossed the threshold for serious enterprise consideration. Through 2024 and 2025 it was a developer favourite but treated as too new for risk-averse finance directors. In 2026 we see growing adoption among UK SMEs willing to migrate at least the cold path of their storage to capture the egress savings.
The third change is that AWS, Azure and GCP have responded with selectively-discounted egress for cross-cloud and to-customer-region scenarios. These discounts are real but rarely apply to the typical UK SME workload, so they appear in the marketing without much effect on actual bills.
First, calculate your actual egress monthly. You can pull it from CloudWatch (AWS), Azure Monitor or GCP Billing. If you have never looked, the number is almost certainly higher than your assumption. Use the egresscost.com calculator or any reputable tool to convert it to an annual cost at the right tier.
Second, identify the dominant component. If you are content-heavy (media, documents, model output), egress is probably already your largest line item. If you are data-heavy (analytics, internal reporting, batch jobs), compute and storage are likely larger and egress is a smaller fix. The right action depends on the answer.
Third, model what a CDN in front of the hyperscaler would do. For most UK SMEs above 10 TB per month, putting Cloudflare or Bunny in front of S3 or Blob storage captures 60 to 85 percent of the egress saving with zero migration risk. Doing this before considering a full provider migration is usually the right sequencing.
All hyperscaler pricing pulled from public AWS, Azure and GCP pricing pages, current as of 4 June 2026. Cloudflare R2 and Backblaze B2 pricing from their public published rate cards. Scenario calculations cross-checked against the publicly-available egresscost.com calculator. USD figures converted to GBP at 1 USD = 0.79 GBP for indicative reading.
Scenarios represent UK SME workload shapes we see across consulting engagements rather than any single client. Anonymised throughout. We do not warrant that any specific cost projection will match your business; for a real cost projection on your workload, run your actual monthly data transfer through egresscost.com or contact us for a tailored review.
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