According to new research, public cloud object storage customers are spending up to half of their overall cloud storage budget on fees, including API calls and egress fees. This being an industry average, some customers may fall on the higher end of that statistic, especially if you’re in an industry like media & entertainment that relies on constant data accessibility.  

It turns out, if you use AWS S3, it can be a bit of a challenge to figure out how much you’re actually spending on egress charges. So below find a handy guide on how to use AWS’ native billing tools to figure this out.  

Step 1 – Log into your payer account 

You must access your AWS master payer account where you have consolidated billing enabled. From the console, you’ll click on services and then on billing and cost management.

Step 2 – Access Cost Explorer 

From the menu on the left, click on Cost Explorer and make any adjustments to the date range you wish to consider.  

From the filters section, find the filter for Service and select S3. Then find the Usage type group section and filter by S3: Data Transfer -Internet (Out). Don’t forget to click apply! 

Step 3 – Analyze your spend 

The graph and data presented will be your spend on transferring bytes out of S3 to the internet – otherwise known as egress fees. At this point, you have the option of grouping your results by Linked Account, Tag, etc. to dive deeper into which accounts or workloads are the biggest aggregator of fees.  

Cost Explorer will let you download this report. Share it with your key decision makers so you have good visibility into your egress charges.  

At Wasabi, we don’t have egress or other fees associated with your object storage. Understanding not just how much you pay per GB for the storage with AWS, but how much you spend on fees is important to figuring out how much you’ll save with Wasabi hot cloud storage.