Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced an expansion of its free tier, increasing the amount of data that customers can transfer from 1GB/month to 100GB/month.
Similarly, data transfer from AWS’ content delivery network (CDN), CloudFront, has also been increased from 50 GB/month to 1 TB/month, while pumping up the number of free HTTP and HTTPs requests from 2 million to 10 million.
“As a result of this change, millions of AWS customers worldwide will no longer see a charge for these two categories of data transfer on their monthly AWS bill. Customers who go beyond one or both of these allocations will also see a reduction in their overall data transfer charges,” shared Jeff Barr, AWS’ Chief Evangelist.
Barr added the new limits come into play on December 1, 2021, and are applicable for all AWS users across its Amazon S3, Amazon EC2, and Elastic Load Balancing services.
Cloud competition
Data transfer fees appear to be the new battleground for cloud services. Although AWS’ free tier has been around since 2010, the expansion comes barely a week after Cloudflare decided to withdraw egress data transfer fees for its Workers Unbound and Durable Objects offerings.
Cloudflare has argued that egress data fees, which come into play when users want to move data out of one cloud onto another, are only charged in order to lock-in a user to a platform.
Cloudflare also stepped on AWS’ feet recently with the launch of their R2 storage, as a direct alternative to Amazon’s S3. Notably, Cloudflare’s R2 also comes with Cloudflare’s zero egress fee guarantee.
The ball is now firmly in the court of Microsoft and Google, and it’ll be interesting to see how they respond.
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