Work out cloud exit cost instantly with clear inputs, formula shown and shareable results.
Exit cost is dominated by re-engineering, not by egress. Extracting 300 TB costs about 27,000 in transfer, while replacing fourteen managed services with self-hosted equivalents costs 840,000 in engineering. That asymmetry is the real lock-in: proprietary managed services, not the data transfer bill that gets the attention.
Exit cost
egress = TB x 1000 x per-GB rate; engineering = managed services x per-service replacement cost
Following European regulatory pressure, the major providers now offer free egress for customers fully leaving, subject to conditions. It does not apply to partial or ongoing transfers.
Prefer open standards and portable runtimes where the cost is reasonable — containers, PostgreSQL, S3-compatible APIs, Kubernetes. Accept lock-in deliberately where the managed service saves enough to justify it.