No Egress Fee Cloud Storage

Egress — data-transfer-out — is the line item that turns a cheap storage bill into an expensive one. You pay to store a file once, then pay again every single time bytes leave the network: every download, image view, and video play. On Amazon S3 that's up to $0.09/GB to the internet; Google Cloud Storage and Azure Blob are in the same neighborhood. The trap is that egress scales with your traffic, not your storage, so a file you uploaded once can bill thousands of times if it gets popular — and you find out after the month closes.

The fix is to pick a no egress fee cloud provider where serving what you stored doesn't open a second meter.

Do the math on going viral. A 5 MB image on S3 at ~$0.09/GB: a quiet month of 1,000 views is ~5 GB out, about $0.45 — invisible. Then it hits the front page and pulls 2,000,000 views: ~10 TB out, roughly $900 in egress for that one file in one month, plus per-request fees, while the storage line barely moved. That asymmetry is the whole problem. files.link removes the separate meter entirely: storage, CDN delivery across 450+ edge locations, and API requests all draw from one prepaid credit balance.

The same viral spike still costs credits, but it doesn't open a surprise per-GB egress invoice you never budgeted for.

This is distinct from the "affordable CDN" angle — it's specifically about the at-rest store not punishing you for serving what you stored. It's also why teams migrate off S3 + CloudFront: adding CloudFront in front of S3 swaps S3-to-internet egress for CloudFront egress (often cheaper, but still per-GB, still a separate metered line) plus per-request fees, and you still wire up and maintain the distribution.

Wasabi and Cloudflare R2 attack the same pain from the storage side (R2 famously zero-rates egress), and they're fair comparisons; the difference here is that delivery, storage, and requests collapse into a single credit balance you watch instead of three independent meters you reconcile. Who benefits most: anyone whose download volume is large or spiky relative to what they store — public image and video hosts, game-asset and software-update distribution, podcast and media hosting, and popular open-source release downloads.

If egress already dwarfs the storage line on your current cloud bill, this is the model that fixes it.