Following up on the September thread: when we tripled traffic on that small stack (load balancer, two app servers, MySQL), modeled cost went up about 48% on AWS, 54% on GCP and 12% on DigitalOcean. All of the increase came from egress, meaning data leaving the provider's network.
So we wrote up how each provider bills it, with list prices retrieved Nov 3 4, 2026:
AWS charges $0.09/GB after 100 GB a month.
GCP Premium Tier charges $0.12/GiB after the first 1 GiB.
DigitalOcean pools a transfer allowance across your Droplets, then charges $0.01/GiB.
The post also covers five ways to cut egress: cross-zone traffic, CDN and caching, smaller responses, NAT gateway charges, and plan allowances.
www.cloudworldmodel.ai/blog/clou...
What's actually moved your egress bill: a CDN, compression, re-architecting cross-zone traffic, or something else?
We just published our September cloud pricing update, with a simulation to put the numbers in context.
The 33 list prices we track across AWS, GCP, Azure, OCI and DigitalOcean didn t change. We made two small corrections to our records, but found no provider price changes.
Then we modeled a load balancer, two app servers and a MySQL database in Cloud World Model, increasing traffic from 100 to 300 requests per second.
A couple of recent conversations have shaped what we re building in Cloud World Model. One led us to model how provider API limits affect bulk updates. Another focused on whether workloads could recover within an EKS Spot interruption window.
Both came down to the same question: What happens if we make this change?
