One service which many cloud provides include in their egress fees is transferring data through their network to close to the other end. This can improve perfor

One service which many cloud provides include in their egress fees is transferring data through their network to close to the other end. This can improve performance as the cloud provider often has a better private network than the public internet. This service is also one that Cloudflare provides, except they don't charge for it. It sounds like what is happening here is that the cloud providers are egressing close to the end within their network directly to Cloudflare, who is then doing the more expensive work of transferring the data to close to the other end. This makes the traffic like intra-regional traffic for the cloud provider, which is often free or deeply discounted.