Bandwidth, transfer and egress are different questions
A network speed describes a rate; a transfer allowance describes a quantity of data; an egress tariff describes what billable outbound traffic costs. A high-speed interface does not establish a large included allowance, and a large allowance does not establish a free overage rate. Read all three separately when buying a VM.
This guide compares the traffic terms actually retained in the normalized catalog. The table shows one available, low-base-price on-demand VM example per provider, with provider-wide context and plan notes. It is not a ranking of cheapest bandwidth: the dataset does not contain a complete structured, region- and destination-qualified overage tariff. Every overage-rate cell therefore stays “Not collected” rather than being filled with an invented zero.
Provider terms can describe bundled transfer, separately priced outbound traffic or an inclusion without overage semantics. A provider-wide description is not a numeric allowance for every VM. Read the selected SKU and region notes alongside it, then follow the vendor product link to investigate the plan you intend to buy.
Included traffic evidence, not an egress price ranking
10 examples from 10 providers. These are selected offers, not an exhaustive market survey or a performance ranking. Use View vendor pricing to open the provider’s readable pricing page and choose your region and configuration. Plan names link to product pages. Technical evidence is available separately under Data sources and collection notes.
| Provider / plan / region | Included traffic evidence | Overage rate | Vendor pricing and details |
|---|---|---|---|
| Akamai Connected CloudNanode 1GBTokyo 2, JPFamily: nanode | 1000 GB or more bundled monthly by plan Includes 1000 GB monthly transfer. Published outbound network limit: 1000 Mbit/s. Do not assume allowances pool across plans or regions. | Not collectedUnknown is not zero. Verify destination, region and billing period with the provider. | View vendor pricing Choose your region and configuration on the vendor’s site.Source as of Freshness deadline: · confidence AData sources and collection notesTechnical evidence used to build this comparison—not a shopping page. Raw pricing data (API/JSON; may require authentication)
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| AWSt4g.nanoUS East (N. Virginia)Family: t4g | EBS volumes, public IPv4 addresses, and outbound transfer are priced separately unless AWS states otherwise. AWS public pricing data identifies this as General purpose; it reports storage as "EBS only" and network as "Up to 5 Gigabit". The feeds do not publish structured processor architecture, physical-core, GPU, storage-medium, or exact network-throughput evidence; those fields remain unknown. Do not assume allowances pool across plans or regions. | Not collectedUnknown is not zero. Verify destination, region and billing period with the provider. | View vendor pricing Choose your region and configuration on the vendor’s site.Source as of Freshness deadline: · confidence AData sources and collection notesTechnical evidence used to build this comparison—not a shopping page. Raw pricing data (API/JSON; may require authentication)
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| DigitalOceanBasic (s-1vcpu-512mb-10gb)Amsterdam 3Family: basic | Monthly outbound transfer allowance varies by size. Includes 500 GB monthly transfer. Do not assume allowances pool across plans or regions. | Not collectedUnknown is not zero. Verify destination, region and billing period with the provider. | View vendor pricing Choose your region and configuration on the vendor’s site.Source as of Freshness deadline: · confidence AData sources and collection notesTechnical evidence used to build this comparison—not a shopping page. Raw pricing data (API/JSON; may require authentication)
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| Google Cloude2-microus-central1Family: e2 | Persistent Disk, public IPv4, and outbound transfer are priced separately. Official Compute Engine machineTypes data establishes virtual CPU count and memory. It does not establish processor architecture, physical cores, allocation guarantees, GPU, local storage, or exact network throughput; those fields remain unknown. Do not assume allowances pool across plans or regions. | Not collectedUnknown is not zero. Verify destination, region and billing period with the provider. | View vendor pricing Choose your region and configuration on the vendor’s site.Source as of Freshness deadline: · confidence BData sources and collection notesTechnical evidence used to build this comparison—not a shopping page. Raw pricing data (API/JSON; may require authentication)
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| Hetzner CloudCX23Falkenstein (FSN1)Family: cost-optimized | Included outbound traffic varies by region and is retained in SKU notes. Cloud servers located in the EU include at least 20 TB of included traffic. Do not assume allowances pool across plans or regions. | Not collectedUnknown is not zero. Verify destination, region and billing period with the provider. | View vendor pricing Choose your region and configuration on the vendor’s site.Source as of Freshness deadline: · confidence AData sources and collection notesTechnical evidence used to build this comparison—not a shopping page. Raw pricing data (API/JSON; may require authentication)
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| Microsoft AzureStandard_B1lsUS EastFamily: azure-vm | Managed disks, public IP addresses, and outbound transfer are priced separately. The Azure Retail Prices API establishes the ARM SKU identifier and price meters but does not publish structured CPU, memory, architecture, GPU, storage, or network specifications; those fields remain unknown. Do not assume allowances pool across plans or regions. | Not collectedUnknown is not zero. Verify destination, region and billing period with the provider. | View vendor pricing Choose your region and configuration on the vendor’s site.Source as of Freshness deadline: · confidence AData sources and collection notesTechnical evidence used to build this comparison—not a shopping page. Raw pricing data (API/JSON; may require authentication)
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| Oracle Cloud InfrastructureVM.Standard.A1.Flex (1 OCPU, 1 GB)Oracle public price list; deployment region not specifiedFamily: a1 | Block storage, public IP addresses, and outbound transfer can be priced separately; no inclusion is assumed by this collector. Processor model, allocation guarantees, sockets, GPU, local storage, and network throughput remain unknown because the collected sources do not establish them as structured facts for this configuration. Do not assume allowances pool across plans or regions. | Not collectedUnknown is not zero. Verify destination, region and billing period with the provider. | View vendor pricing Choose your region and configuration on the vendor’s site.Source as of Freshness deadline: · confidence AData sources and collection notesTechnical evidence used to build this comparison—not a shopping page. Raw pricing data (API/JSON; may require authentication)
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| ScalewayDEV1-SParis 1 (fr-par-1)Family: development | List prices include egress and IPv6 addresses. Do not assume allowances pool across plans or regions. | Not collectedUnknown is not zero. Verify destination, region and billing period with the provider. | View vendor pricing Choose your region and configuration on the vendor’s site.Source as of Freshness deadline: · confidence AData sources and collection notesTechnical evidence used to build this comparison—not a shopping page. Raw pricing data (API/JSON; may require authentication)
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| UpCloudSTARTER-1xCPU-1GBSydney #1 (au-syd1)Family: starter | Structured plan records report publicTrafficOut amounts, but the calculator payload does not establish overage semantics. Structured plan record reports 512 GiB publicTrafficOut; the calculator payload does not establish overage semantics, so this is retained only as source context. Do not assume allowances pool across plans or regions. | Not collectedUnknown is not zero. Verify destination, region and billing period with the provider. | View vendor pricing Choose your region and configuration on the vendor’s site.Source as of Freshness deadline: · confidence BData sources and collection notesTechnical evidence used to build this comparison—not a shopping page. Original pricing document
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| Vultrvc2-1c-0.5gb-v6Atlanta (atl)Family: vc2 | Provider-wide transfer terms not specified in the collected data. Published transfer allowance: 512 GB. Do not assume allowances pool across plans or regions. | Not collectedUnknown is not zero. Verify destination, region and billing period with the provider. | View vendor pricing Choose your region and configuration on the vendor’s site.Source as of Freshness deadline: · confidence AData sources and collection notesTechnical evidence used to build this comparison—not a shopping page. Raw pricing data (API/JSON; may require authentication)
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How to interpret the evidence
A numeric allowance is only a starting point. Where the collected plan notes specify a quantity of monthly transfer, preserve the stated unit and billing period. Do not silently convert GB to GiB, assume an allowance is prorated in a particular way, or pool it across machines. The collected amount alone does not establish those rules.
“Included” and “unlimited” need conditions. An inclusion statement can coexist with throughput limits, destination restrictions or acceptable-use terms. The table keeps published wording and network limits separate. A missing per-GB rate is not proof that there can never be an extra charge.
A compute API is not an egress calculator. Some official feeds price CPU and memory without collecting the network tariff at all. Other plan APIs expose transfer quantities but not what happens above them. That is a coverage limit of this publication, not evidence that the vendor fails to publish a policy elsewhere.
Build a traffic budget before selecting the VM
- Describe the traffic path. Record the source region, destination region or internet destination, direction and service involved. Separate user downloads, replication, backup exports and traffic between regions.
- Measure an expected month and a busy month. Estimate transferred data from your workload, keeping the vendor’s billing units explicit. Include repeated downloads and restore traffic rather than only the size of stored data.
- Find the allowance rules. Ask whether the selected plan’s allowance is per VM, per account or pooled, and whether short-lived instances receive the full allowance. Confirm which paths consume it.
- Obtain the actual tariff. Use the provider’s current networking or bandwidth documentation and billing calculator for the exact destination and region. Establish overage tiers, minimums, tax and any separate service charges before computing a total.
- Set an operational guardrail. Configure usage alerts and understand whether the provider offers a hard spending limit. An alert is not itself a cap, and a base-compute monthly cap does not cap unrelated traffic charges.
Only after those fields are known can you combine base compute, chargeable traffic and the remaining services into a meaningful monthly scenario. There is no worked vendor-cost total here because the required rate data is absent. If you need a small fixed compute budget first, use the under-$10 guide, then apply this traffic checklist to its shortlist.
Provider billing and source notes
Akamai Connected Cloud
Official Linode API hourly prices and monthly caps; regional overrides applied when published.
View vendor pricing at Akamai Connected Cloud ↗Data source for these billing notes
This is the original collection source for auditing our data. It may contain raw API/JSON data or require authentication; it is not a buying page.
Original collection sourceAWS
Official AWS public pricing-page feeds in USD. Linux shared tenancy is selected; On-Demand, current Spot, and No Upfront Reserved Instance terms are published as separate price records. Tax treatment is not established by these feeds.
View vendor pricing at AWS ↗Data source for these billing notes
This is the original collection source for auditing our data. It may contain raw API/JSON data or require authentication; it is not a buying page.
Original collection sourceDigitalOcean
Official API hourly prices and monthly caps; availability confirmed by both sizes and regions resources.
View vendor pricing at DigitalOcean ↗Data source for these billing notes
This is the original collection source for auditing our data. It may contain raw API/JSON data or require authentication; it is not a buying page.
Original collection sourceGoogle Cloud
Official Cloud Billing Catalog on-demand USD core and RAM rates are composed with official Compute Engine machine-type specifications. Sustained-use, commitment, Spot, and preemptible terms are not mixed into these rows. Tax treatment is not established by the APIs.
View vendor pricing at Google Cloud ↗Data source for these billing notes
This is the original collection source for auditing our data. It may contain raw API/JSON data or require authentication; it is not a buying page.
Original collection sourceHetzner Cloud
Official website price API base EUR rates before country VAT; hourly billing with a monthly cap; primary IPv4 included.
View vendor pricing at Hetzner Cloud ↗Data source for these billing notes
This is the original collection source for auditing our data. It may contain raw API/JSON data or require authentication; it is not a buying page.
Original collection sourceMicrosoft Azure
Official Azure Retail Prices API USD rates. Consumption and Spot are hourly; reservation totals are normalized over their prepaid term. Tax treatment is not established by the API response.
View vendor pricing at Microsoft Azure ↗Data source for these billing notes
This is the original collection source for auditing our data. It may contain raw API/JSON data or require authentication; it is not a buying page.
Original collection sourceOracle Cloud Infrastructure
Official public USD PAY_AS_YOU_GO component prices are composed for curated flexible VM configurations. Free usage allowances and commitment terms are excluded. The public API does not qualify prices by deployment region or establish tax treatment.
View vendor pricing at Oracle Cloud Infrastructure ↗Data source for these billing notes
This is the original collection source for auditing our data. It may contain raw API/JSON data or require authentication; it is not a buying page.
Original collection sourceScaleway
Official zone API native EUR hourly list prices and provider-published approximate 730-hour monthly estimates before tax; the estimates are not authoritative monthly prices or caps. Plan presence in a zone response is treated as orderability.
List prices include egress and IPv6 addresses; storage and attached public IPv4 addresses are excluded.
View vendor pricing at Scaleway ↗Data source for these billing notes
This is the original collection source for auditing our data. It may contain raw API/JSON data or require authentication; it is not a buying page.
Original collection sourceUpCloud
Official calculator native EUR hourly list rates and provider 28-day (672-hour) monthly caps. Tax basis is not stated in the calculator payload, so normalized USD comparison is intentionally unavailable.
View vendor pricing at UpCloud ↗Data source for these billing notes
This is the original collection source for auditing our data. It may contain raw API/JSON data or require authentication; it is not a buying page.
Original collection sourceVultr
Official API list prices; regional overrides are applied when published.
View vendor pricing at Vultr ↗Data source for these billing notes
This is the original collection source for auditing our data. It may contain raw API/JSON data or require authentication; it is not a buying page.
Original collection sourceSelection, freshness and limitations
We join the published normalized catalog to its price records by SKU, region, pricing model and commitment. Only active VMs marked available, with positive on-demand prices and no commitment, enter these examples. Known GPU offers, unavailable or unpriced plans, stale providers, stale rows and expired price evidence are excluded at build time. Availability describes the collected catalog, not live capacity or account eligibility at checkout.
Selection favors provider coverage rather than repeated regions. Within a provider and native currency, the lowest monthly amount supplies a representative; ties use stable SKU and region identifiers. The 32 GiB guide allows two distinct families per provider, the direct comparison one offer at each selected memory size, and the other guides one example per provider. All lists stop at twelve examples. Currency groups are not ranked against each other. If a provider has multiple native currencies, selection uses the first currency code alphabetically for each family or memory target; this is a deterministic scope choice, not a currency-value comparison.
A vendor monthly cap is not hourly price multiplied by 730. An estimate uses the catalog’s 730-hour basis and is not a price guarantee; the actual month, usage and component billing matter. Native EUR and GBP remain native; no exchange-rate estimate is used to qualify a dollar budget or declare a cross-currency winner. Tax, IPv4, disks, snapshots, backups, licenses, support and transfer can change the bill. Unknown fields are not free inclusions or performance guarantees.
Source dates and freshness deadlines appear beside each example. They describe published evidence, not a promise of continuous live checking. Read the comparison methodology and full Cloud VM catalog for broader coverage and freshness context.