Turning Cloud Migration Costs into Cloud Storage Savings

This is the fourth in a series of blog posts based on excerpts from our new cloud cost optimization eBook. It is designed to explore the hidden costs of cloud migration and how Wasabi Cloud Sync Manager helps you turn that cost center into a clear savings opportunity.

Organizations flocked to the cloud for scalability, agility, and cost-efficiency. But many are discovering that the cost savings promised by hyperscale cloud providers come with a catch: it’s easy to get in, but costly to get out. Cloud object storage customers report high satisfaction overall—until the bill comes. In fact, the 2025 Wasabi Cloud Storage Index report reveals that nearly 9 out of 10 users are satisfied with their cloud storage experience… except when it comes to fees.

These fees—especially the ones tied to accessing or migrating your own data—aren’t just a nuisance. They’re a strategic lock-in mechanism. Hyperscalers have created a complex, tiered pricing system that makes it painful to move, access, or optimize your storage. And while many businesses want to adopt hybrid or multicloud approaches, the cost of migration alone can make them feel trapped.

We’ll explore the hidden costs of cloud migration and how Wasabi Cloud Sync Manager helps you turn that cost center into a clear savings opportunity.

The walled garden: does cloud migration cost more than it saves?

Of all the fees associated with cloud storage, egress fees are arguably the most egregious. They aren’t just expensive—they are deliberately designed to lock you into a single cloud provider, making it difficult to adopt a true hybrid cloud or multicloud strategy where you can freely and cost-effectively move your data to applications and platforms that span multiple cloud and on-premises ecosystems.

But egress is only one of several fees hyperscalers collect. When you go to take your data out of a hyperscale cloud, the operation is broken into three parts, each with its own associated costs: API request fees, data retrieval fees, and, finally, egress fees. To add further complexity, these fees go up in price the “colder” your storage tier until the cost of data access and related fees far eclipse what you pay to store it.

Here’s the kicker. Cloud providers don’t charge you to move data within their own ecosystem. For example, AWS won’t charge you to move data between services like S3, EC2, and Redshift within the same region. But the moment you try to move your data outside of their ecosystem—whether to another cloud provider for analytics, to an on-premises data center, or to a lower-cost cloud storage provider—you get hit with egress fees.

This is the “walled garden” of hyperscale cloud services. They provide you everything you could want within their system—at a price. Just don’t go looking outside their walls for alternatives or it’ll cost you more than you can imagine.

Migration taxation: cost of cloud migration

Looking to make a change? Migration from one hyperscaler to another is often expensive and time-consuming as hyperscalers charge users hefty cloud migration costs at every step of the journey.

• Out – As previously mentioned, hyperscalers charge organizations egress when they try to remove any data from their ecosystem. This operation becomes more expensive if the data is held on a “cold” archive tier.

• Across – Hyperscalers also charge networking fees for moving data across the public internet. Depending on the amount of data being moved and the network capacity utilized, this can be both expensive and time-consuming.

• In – Finally, data incurs an ingress cost (API PUT operations) when it arrives at a new hyperscale cloud, which also varies in price depending on the storage tier.

This array of charges can eat into any return on investment (ROI) expected to be gained by switching to a less expensive cloud storage provider in the first place. With fees like this, it may take months to realize the savings you hoped to achieve, if you end up saving anything at all.

Cloud-to-cloud migration with Wasabi Cloud Sync Manager

Wasabi turns the typical cloud storage pricing model on its head. Our affordable per-TB, flat-rate pricing makes us an ideal destination for cloud storage customers looking to cut costs and build a custom solution with applications they choose. With no fees for egress, ingress, or API operations, Wasabi acts as a safe haven for your data, so you have the freedom to leverage best-of-breed compute, analytics, backup, and other S3-compatible applications and platforms to build the solutions that work best for your specific needs. No walls to be found.

To make the move easier, our secure cloud-to-cloud transfer service–Wasabi Cloud Sync Manager–gives users a simple, seamless migration tool to mitigate the high costs of transferring out of the hyperscalers. Users can transfer data from any major cloud storage provider or S3-compatible storage solution to Wasabi in just a few clicks and quickly reap the benefits of switching.

At just pennies per GB to migrate, and savings up to 80% compared to AWS S3, Azure Hot, and Google Cloud Platform, most customers realize ROI in as little as 60 days. If you’re looking to employ a multicloud or hybrid cloud approach or are just sick of paying a small fortune just to access your own data, Wasabi is the clear choice.

Curious about how much you can save? Try our new ROI calculator to see your estimated cost of migration, total estimated savings after 1 year, and an ROI percentage with just a few clicks.