What free egress means on the day you restore

Free egress can describe an allowance, a price, or a policy

Free egress can mean unlimited transfer at $0 per GB, a monthly amount tied to storage, a fixed account allowance, transfer bundled into a subscription, or no fee at all under a fair-use guideline. Those shapes answer different questions and should not be reduced to a yes or no.

What the allowance is based on matters as much as the word free. A proportional allowance can use monthly average storage or active storage, while a fixed allowance can apply to an account, region, destination, plan, or number of active hours.

How Backblaze, Cloudflare, and Wasabi treat free egress

Backblaze B2 includes free egress up to three times monthly average storage and then publishes a $0.01 per GB overage. The allowance scales with stored data and converts cleanly to a dollar result above the limit. [1]

Cloudflare R2 charges no internet-egress bandwidth for either storage class. The transfer line is unlimited at $0, but Class A and B operations remain billable, and Infrequent Access adds $0.01 per GB of retrieval. [3]

Wasabi treats egress at or below active storage as a good fit for its free-egress policy and charges nothing for egress at any volume. Exceeding that guideline on a regular basis can lead to limitation or suspension, so the calculator here prices a restore month above it at $0, as Wasabi bills it, and marks the line with that policy. [4]

One workload, three egress results

With 5,000 GB stored and 6,000 GB downloaded in one month, Backblaze B2 stays inside its 15,000 GB allowance, R2 keeps the internet-egress line at $0, and Wasabi crosses its 5,000 GB policy guideline by 1,000 GB. [1] [3] [4]

All three give a full egress price from the published rules. Wasabi's excess costs nothing, but it is outside Wasabi's guideline, so the bill carries that policy beside the $0. [4]

Free egress allowances at all 18 vendors

Fixed allowances behave differently from storage-linked allowances because adding stored capacity does not automatically increase them. Bundled allowances add another dependency: the subscription and its active time can determine how much transfer is included.

The table classifies all 18 vendors by allowance shape. Each claim cell cites its source, and class-specific rules a vendor does not publish are marked not published.

Unlimited transfer removes one line, not the whole bill

Unlimited transfer removes the internet-egress line only. R2 still charges operation classes and Infrequent Access retrieval, Tigris charges retrieval on two classes and temporary Standard storage for Archive restores, Filebase charges operations beyond its allowances, and OVHcloud archive classes can charge retrieval. [3] [20] [21] [11]

Minimum-duration charges are also separate, but a read-only restore does not trigger them. Add a duration remainder only when the workflow deletes, overwrites, moves, or transitions an object early. [3] [4]

Unpublished prices are a risk, not a bargain

Treat an unpublished price as a risk, not a bargain. DigitalOcean publishes no rate for partner paths. Wasabi is the opposite case: it charges nothing beyond its guideline, and the risk is a limited account if you exceed it regularly, not a bill. Two neighboring rules are published and easy to misread: DigitalOcean's transfer to its own Droplets is free only on listed routes, such as NYC3 to NYC1, NYC2, and NYC3, and OVHcloud Cold Archive includes public transfer but charges $0.01062 per GiB to retrieve data, plus Standard storage for the restored copy. [4] [26] [27]

A backup plan should state what happens when a full restore crosses an allowance. If the answer is an unpublished rate, the estimate should show that and decline to give a false total; if it is a fair-use policy with no fee, the estimate should show the $0 with the policy beside it.