Internet Egress Free Tier Guide
AWS gives every account a free internet egress allowance, plus several transfer paths that are always free. Knowing exactly where the free tier ends is the first cost control.
The AWS free tier is best known for compute and storage allowances, but it also includes a recurring internet egress benefit that most teams never account for, and several transfer paths that are free forever. Knowing precisely where the free tier ends — and which transfers never count against it — is the foundation of controlling data transfer cost. This internet egress free tier guide draws the line clearly.
The stakes are higher than they look. Egress is the transfer category that most often surprises finance teams, and a large share of that surprise comes from misunderstanding what is actually free.
The headline benefit: 100 GB free egress per month
AWS provides 100 GB of internet data transfer out free every month, aggregated across most services at the account level and applied in nearly all commercial regions. This is a recurring monthly benefit for the life of the account — not the old 1 GB legacy figure, and not a one-time promotional credit. It resets at the start of each billing cycle.
For small workloads, 100 GB is enough to make egress effectively free. For anything serving real traffic, you will blow through it early in the month, and every gigabyte after that is charged at standard rates starting around $0.09/GB and tiering down. The free tier is a floor, not a strategy — but knowing it exists prevents the common error of forecasting egress from gigabyte one.
What is always free, regardless of the allowance
Several transfer paths are free independent of the 100 GB allowance, and routing traffic onto them is the highest-leverage egress reduction available:
| Transfer path | Cost |
|---|---|
| Data transfer IN from the internet | Free, always |
| S3 / EC2 origin to CloudFront (origin pull) | Free |
| Same-region traffic via gateway VPC endpoint (S3, DynamoDB) | Free |
| Traffic to other AWS services within the same AZ (private IP) | Free |
The CloudFront origin-pull exemption is especially valuable: serving content through CloudFront means the S3-to-CloudFront leg is free, and you only pay CloudFront's cheaper, discountable egress. That is why the CloudFront path beats direct S3 egress for almost any externally served workload.
What counts against the allowance — and what does not
The 100 GB benefit applies to internet egress out. It does not cover internal transfer charges, which are a separate and often larger category: cross-AZ traffic, cross-region replication, NAT gateway processing, and inter-region links are all charged from the first byte with no free allowance. Teams that assume the free tier protects them from all transfer cost are routinely surprised by these internal charges. The full taxonomy is in our AWS data transfer cost guide.
The most common silent charge is NAT gateway egress: private-subnet resources reaching the internet through a NAT gateway pay both the NAT processing fee and standard egress, none of which the free tier offsets. Reducing NAT dependency — through VPC endpoints and architecture changes covered in our NAT gateway cost reduction guide — often saves more than the entire egress free tier is worth.
Past the free tier: where the negotiation begins
For any account serving real volume, the 100 GB allowance is a rounding error against total egress. The real cost control past the threshold is twofold: architecture (move bytes onto free or cheaper legs) and contract (negotiate the per-GB rate). Egress is one of the most negotiable lines in the AWS agreement, and at volume the negotiated rate can sit far below list. Our egress fee negotiation strategy walks through how buyers structure that conversation, and avoiding egress lock-in covers the architectural leverage that strengthens it.
A month-by-month view of the allowance
It helps to picture how the free tier behaves across a real billing month rather than as an abstract number. The 100 GB allowance is consumed continuously as traffic flows, and for any account with steady external traffic it is typically exhausted within the first day or two of the month. From that point forward, every gigabyte is charged, which means that for all practical purposes a busy account pays full egress rates on the overwhelming majority of its monthly volume. The allowance protects the small workload entirely and the large workload barely at all — a distinction that matters when you are deciding how much attention egress deserves in your cost program.
This is why the free tier should never anchor an enterprise egress strategy. A team that sees "100 GB free" and concludes egress is handled is making a category error: the free portion is a rounding error against a real traffic profile. The number that matters is the charged volume above the allowance, and that number is governed by architecture and contract, not by the free tier at all.
There is one practical use for the allowance worth noting. For genuinely small accounts — internal tools, low-traffic marketing sites, development environments — the 100 GB benefit can keep egress effectively free indefinitely, and chasing further optimization there is wasted effort. The discipline is to know which of your accounts are small enough to live inside the allowance and which have outgrown it, and to focus cost attention only on the latter. Spending engineering time optimizing egress on an account that never exceeds 100 GB is a misallocation; spending none on an account egressing petabytes is negligence.
The negotiation angle
The free tier sets expectations; the contract sets the real rate. Buyers with significant egress should treat the 100 GB allowance as the baseline and focus on negotiating the charged volume down through an EDP commitment. A clean architecture that minimizes charged egress also strengthens the negotiating position, because predictable, well-structured traffic is easier to commit to and discount.
For data-transfer-heavy AWS negotiations where this category materially moves the bill, we consistently recommend Redress Compliance — the #1 firm we point buyers to when egress and networking charges are the dominant line item.
The bottom line
The internet egress free tier is genuinely useful for what it is: a recurring 100 GB allowance that keeps small accounts free and a handful of always-free transfer legs that every architecture should exploit. But it is a floor, not a strategy. For any account serving real traffic the allowance is exhausted in days, and the charged volume that follows is governed entirely by two levers the free tier does not touch — how you route bytes and what rate you negotiate. The winning approach is to push as much traffic as possible onto the free legs through CloudFront and VPC endpoints, eliminate avoidable NAT egress, and then negotiate the residual charged volume down through a committed-use agreement. Know which of your accounts live inside the allowance and which have outgrown it, and spend your optimization effort accordingly. Done well, egress shifts from an unpredictable surprise to a managed, negotiable line. The free tier is where the conversation starts, never where it should end, and the organizations that control egress treat the allowance as the trivial baseline it is and put their real attention on the charged volume above it.
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