I accept there's some level of cost, but the prices are so high it's hard to describe it as anything other than gouging to prevent competition

My personal feeling is they're moving costs around so that egress has a big margin and other items have a smaller or potentially negative margin.

I've seen this at other providers. We did a competitive pricing exercise at my last company, and our overall cost went down, but the mechanism was per hosts costs went down significantly and egress costs went up significantly, and the per host cost decrease outweighed the egress cost increase.

It still doesn't make sense to charge for ingress, because everybody knows that should be free, unless you're a residential ISP.

Many companies in many industries do this. It’s often simply not practical or sensible to price every SKU “fairly “ on some value or cost basis. Your margin varies from item to item (including negative) and the whole bundle works out.

y'all vastly underestimate how much it costs to run a CDN as large as that at scale.

bandwidth from cogent at whatever colo you can cross connect to them is wildly cheaper than "i need bandwith to everywhere" bandwidth.

> The industry standard

Pfft...

> for peering is paying the 95th percentile of egress or ingress depending on whichever is greater. Ingress is free for these clouds because egress > ingress overall

How about customers pay for actual usage, rather than some [fake] averaged-across-all-customers usage?

Why would the cloud provider charge for usage that doesn't actually cost them money? Unless usage patterns drastically change industry-wide, the ingress really doesn't matter to them. The egress does.

It seems entirely reasonable to look more skeptically at cloud providers' exact charges vs cost for egress, particularly when high egress fees might contribute to lock-in, and when the public price sheet vs the preferred customer pricing might differ radically. But asking them to totally restructure the charges, inventing a charge for ingress when their actual total ingress cost is zero and, short of major industry-wide usage pattern changes, will remain zero? Why would you do that?

Yeah, it's long been common for more traditional hosting providers to limit egress traffic and charge overage fees for going over that but have no similar limit on incoming traffic for basically the same reason: their network-wide traffic patterns mean that egress is what costs them money and ingress is effectively free on top of that.