You can now request AWS to waive off your data transfer out costs if you wish to migrate to a different cloud provider.

In March, 2024, AWS made an announcement to waive off the data transfer out charges if a customer wants to migrate away from AWS to some other cloud. Original post: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/free-data-transfer-out-to-internet-when-moving-out-of-aws.

What Does This Mean?

When it comes to migrating away from AWS, it always has been like a walled garden. AWS always allowed free unlimited inbound traffic to your infrastructure. However, any outbound traffic is charged after a monthly limit of 100GB. Let’s assume that you have a database with 100GB of data and an S3 buckets having 10 TB of images and videos. If you want to migrate all this data to a new cloud provider, earlier you would have to pay (100GB * 0 + 10*1000 GB * 0.09) = $900 in data transfer out charges alone. This can easily become hundreds of thousands of dollars if you store a lot more data. With this announcement, AWS can now waive off this charge by giving you a one time credit if you ask them to.

It is one step forward towards empowering customers to choose the best cloud provider for themselves and not feel locked-in because of these archaic charges.

Whom does this impact?

You can get the benefit if you are planning to migrate away from AWS to some other cloud like Azure or GCP or whatever. Regular data transfer charges will still apply and there will be no changes to that.

How to get the waiver?

Applying for the waiver is an entirely manual process! You’ll have to contact AWS support team and ask for free DTO rates for the additional data to help you with the migration. AWS will review the request and once approved, will provide credits for the data being migrated.