Apparently a 256GB microSD card is $28.99, so 12 cents per gig is more expensive: https://www.techradar.com/news/this-is-the-cheapest-microsd-...

Perhaps Azure should offer to mail you the MicroSD card as well? Postage is only $0.58 for a First Class stamp, and less with a postal meter.

That would still be cheaper than Azure's transit traffic.

As the good old Tanenbaum quote goes: "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway".

I work a lot with video production and mailing SD cards or driving around hard drives is still the best way to transfer data quickly and cheaply. The cloud is too expensive (both storage and egress) and P2P (Syncthing) is too slow with more than 2 contributors. Despite most of my regular team now having FTTH (except me!!), we still manually transfer media files and use P2P for the rest of the project.

Azure's pricing for data can be weird (or used to be.

Didn't they used to charge for transfers between resources in different AZ's in same region? And VNET peering I think was chargeable, so you'd have situations where within a region you'd be paying outbound AND INBOUND charges.

Anyways, the little I looked, the "free" bandwidth alliance data transfer really wasn't free from what I could see but I didn't look too hard.