Did you think you were saving money by migrating your data to the cloud? The bill has arrived. And it comes with an egress fee. In the time it took you to read this sentence, your company spent about $0.09 for every gigabyte of data transferred from the cloud to the internet—a cost that, for a 500 TB migration, totals $46,000 . Just for egress. Just to leave the cloud. The global cloud storage market, valued at $150 billion in 2026 , is growing at an annual rate of 16% to 23% . It is projected to surpass $500 billion by 2031 . But here’s the secret providers don’t tell you: storing is cheap; leaving is expensive. Egress fees—the "toll" for moving your data out of the cloud—range from $0.05 to $0.09 per GB . And that’s just the beginning. Costs for requests, retrieval, and cross-region transfers can add 30% to 70% to your estimated bill . The result? 84% of companies have blown past their cloud storage budgets , and nearly one in five exceeded their budget by more than 30% ....