The question is why egress costs this much in the first place though. All cloud providers pay for the aggregate bandwidth, but its cost seems substantially lowe

The question is why egress costs this much in the first place though. All cloud providers pay for the aggregate bandwidth, but its cost seems substantially lower than what they charge for the traffic volume: https://blog.cloudflare.com/aws-egregious-egress/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/aws-egregious-egress/ https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/aws-morning-brief/how-aws-is-still-egregiously-egressing/ https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/aws-morning-brief/how-... Also to note that on many smaller VPS providers customers rightfully pay for the bandwidth, not total traffic. So this charging-by-traffic appears to have no other explanation than predatory practices.