Dan here (also Paperspace team). Totally agree that transfer costs are a significant pain point which is why we do not charge for it. We can peer with other providers (eg with AWS we can leverage Direct Connect directly from our datacenters) but most of our customers don't implement this unless they're moving major traffic.
That's a good start but do you have a partnership with anyone that can provide storage with free/low cost bandwidth to your service? Even Direct Connect is ridiculously expensive compared to transit.
>Getting the data into and out of compute services is the most difficult part financially, at least in my experience.
You can never forget that this is entirely because of compute services ripping you off, not because they're providing a valuable service in return for the transfer pricing.
Oh I never do forget. I currently colocate and buy transit and it's blindlingly obvious to me how much of a ripoff cloud egress is.
Even their "direct connect" services cost more than my transit does.
Getting the data into and out of compute services is the most difficult part financially, at least in my experience.