If you’re an IT director or CTO at a mid-market company, you’ve probably heard the pitch: AWS is the world’s largest cloud provider, offering unmatched scale and flexibility. And it’s true—AWS is a powerhouse. But there’s a side of the AWS pricing story that doesn’t make it into the sales deck: the hidden costs that can turn a predictable cloud budget into a finance team nightmare.
For enterprises with dedicated FinOps teams and multi-million-dollar cloud spends, these costs are manageable. But for mid-market companies—those with 200 to 5,000 employees—the complexity and surprise charges can eat into budgets faster than you’d expect. Let’s break down what you’re actually paying for when you choose AWS, and why many mid-market companies are reconsidering their options.
The Most Common Surprise: Egress Fees
Data transfer costs—specifically egress fees—are the number one source of sticker shock on AWS bills. Egress refers to data leaving AWS and going to the internet or another region. AWS charges $0.09 per GB for data transfer out after the first 100GB per month.
Here’s a concrete example: Let’s say you’re running a SaaS platform serving 5,000 users. Each user downloads an average of 2GB per month (reports, dashboards, media files). That’s 10TB of egress per month. At $0.09/GB, you’re paying approximately $900 per month just to send data to your customers. That’s $10,800 per year in egress fees alone—before compute, storage, or any other services.
For companies streaming video, serving large datasets, or running analytics platforms with frequent data exports, egress costs can easily reach thousands of dollars per month. And because egress scales with usage, it’s nearly impossible to predict accurately during budget planning.
NAT Gateway Costs: The Silent Budget Killer
If you’re running private subnets in AWS (and you should be, for security), you need NAT Gateways to allow outbound internet access. AWS charges for NAT Gateways in two ways:
- Hourly charge: $0.045 per hour ($32.40/month per gateway)
- Data processing charge: $0.045 per GB processed
For a single NAT Gateway running 24/7 in one availability zone, you’re looking at a minimum of $32.40 per month—before any data processing. Add in the data processing fees (every byte going through the gateway), and costs climb quickly.
Now consider that best practices recommend running NAT Gateways in multiple availability zones for redundancy. Suddenly, you’re paying $100+ per month just for NAT infrastructure across your VPCs. And if you have multiple VPCs (development, staging, production), multiply that cost again.
Inter-AZ Data Transfer: The Hidden Tax on High Availability
Running workloads across multiple availability zones (AZs) is a core AWS best practice for high availability. But AWS charges $0.01 per GB for data transfer between AZs—in both directions.
This charge is invisible until your first bill arrives. If you’re running a database cluster with read replicas in multiple AZs, or if your application communicates frequently between services across zones, you’re paying for every single byte that crosses AZ boundaries.
For a moderately busy application transferring 1TB per month between AZs, that’s $10/month per direction, or $20/month total. Again, not massive on its own—but it’s one more line item that adds up when you’re running production workloads at scale.
Support Tiers: Paying Extra to Get Help
AWS support is tiered, and the free tier is essentially useless for production workloads. You get access to documentation and forums—that’s it. For any kind of meaningful support, you need to upgrade:
- Developer: $29/month or 3% of monthly spend (whichever is greater)
- Business: $100/month minimum or 10% of monthly spend
- Enterprise: $15,000/month minimum or tiered percentage of spend
For a mid-market company spending $10,000/month on AWS, Business support adds another $1,000/month—$12,000 per year—just to get access to faster response times and technical support. You’re essentially paying extra to get help with the platform you’re already paying for.
Compare this to Open Edge, where a dedicated account team and enterprise-grade support are included in your contract—no upsell, no tiers, no surprise support charges.
Reserved Instances and Savings Plans: Great Discounts, Enormous Complexity
AWS offers Reserved Instances (RIs) and Savings Plans that can reduce compute costs by 30-70%. The discounts are real and substantial—if you can navigate the complexity.
To optimize RIs and Savings Plans effectively, you need:
- Deep understanding of your current and future usage patterns
- Accurate forecasting across instance types, regions, and workloads
- Ongoing monitoring and adjustments as your infrastructure evolves
- Coordination across teams to ensure commitments align with actual needs
Large enterprises have dedicated FinOps teams to manage this. Mid-market companies don’t. The cognitive overhead of optimizing RIs often outweighs the savings—or worse, you over-commit to capacity you don’t use and end up paying for unused reservations.
The “Small” Charges That Add Up
Beyond the major cost centers, AWS bills for dozens of smaller services that individually seem negligible but collectively add hundreds or thousands of dollars to your monthly spend:
- EBS snapshots: $0.05 per GB-month. Storing 5TB of snapshots costs $250/month.
- CloudWatch detailed monitoring: $0.30 per metric per month. 100 custom metrics = $30/month.
- S3 request pricing: $0.005 per 1,000 PUT requests, $0.0004 per 1,000 GET requests. High-traffic applications rack up charges quickly.
- Cross-region replication: Data transfer and storage costs for replicating data across regions for disaster recovery.
- Load balancer costs: Application Load Balancers (ALBs) charge $0.0225/hour plus Load Balancer Capacity Unit (LCU) pricing. Each ALB costs approximately $20-25/month minimum, even when idle. Run multiple ALBs across environments and you’re paying $100+/month just for load balancing infrastructure.
None of these charges are outrageous on their own. But when you add them all up—NAT Gateways, egress fees, inter-AZ transfer, support, EBS snapshots, CloudWatch, load balancers, and the dozens of other line items on a typical AWS bill—you end up with a monthly invoice that’s 30-50% higher than the “compute + storage” estimate you started with.
A Real-World Cost Breakdown
Let’s look at a realistic scenario for a mid-market SaaS company running a moderately complex infrastructure on AWS:
| Service | Monthly Cost |
|---|---|
| EC2 instances (10 instances, mix of sizes) | $2,500 |
| RDS database (multi-AZ, moderate size) | $800 |
| EBS storage (5TB) | $500 |
| S3 storage and requests (10TB) | $300 |
| Data transfer out (egress, 10TB) | $900 |
| NAT Gateways (3 AZs) | $150 |
| Inter-AZ data transfer | $100 |
| Application Load Balancers (3 ALBs) | $75 |
| CloudWatch, EBS snapshots, misc. | $400 |
| Business support (10% of spend) | $575 |
| Total Monthly Cost | $6,300 |
Now compare this to the Open Edge model for an equivalent workload:
| What’s Included | Monthly Cost |
|---|---|
| Compute, storage, networking, load balancing | $3,800 |
| Egress (unlimited) | Included |
| Support (dedicated account team) | Included |
| Monitoring and alerting | Included |
| Inter-AZ and inter-region transfer | Included |
| Total Monthly Cost | $3,800 |
That’s $2,500 per month in savings—$30,000 per year—with zero surprise line items and predictable budgeting. Your finance team will thank you.
Why Mid-Market Companies Get Hit Hardest
AWS pricing is optimized for two types of customers: small startups with minimal usage (who stay under free tier limits) and massive enterprises with dedicated FinOps teams to optimize every dollar. Mid-market companies fall into the gap.
You’re large enough that AWS costs are significant—often representing 10-20% of your IT budget—but you don’t have the resources to hire a full-time cloud financial analyst. You’re paying enterprise-scale bills without enterprise-scale optimization capabilities.
This is where Open Edge thrives. Our all-inclusive contract pricing model eliminates the complexity:
- No egress fees: Data transfer out is included. Serve your customers without worrying about bandwidth costs.
- No surprise line items: One predictable monthly price that covers compute, storage, networking, load balancing, and support.
- Dedicated account team included: You get enterprise-grade support without paying extra. No tiers, no upsells.
- Finance-friendly budgeting: Contract pricing means your finance team can accurately forecast cloud costs months or years in advance.
AWS is a phenomenal platform for companies that have the scale and resources to optimize it. But for mid-market companies looking for simplicity, predictability, and transparent pricing, Open Edge offers a better path forward.
Ready to Simplify Your Cloud Costs?
If you’re tired of surprise AWS charges and complex billing, it’s time to explore a better alternative. Open Edge delivers enterprise-grade managed cloud infrastructure with transparent, all-inclusive pricing designed for mid-market companies.
Let’s talk about what your actual cloud costs should be—without the hidden fees.