# Cloud egress, not compute, is what eats a data-heavy product's margin

- Category: business
- Author: Mihai Negrea (https://indie.md/people/mihai-negrea/)
- Source: https://indie.md/journeys/mihai-datadriven/
- Canonical URL: https://indie.md/advice/watch-the-egress-not-the-compute/

Mihai's Azure bill was not dominated by the compute he had planned for, but by data movement he had never priced: documents flowing from the procurement system into processing, into storage, back out to jobs and users, culminating in a 700 EUR ingress charge in a single month. Hyperscaler pricing makes exactly this traffic expensive while keeping headline compute prices attractive, which is why his migration to Hetzner dedicated servers and S3-compatible storage, plus a self-hosted OCR pipeline on a local GPU, cut a 2,500 to 3,000 EUR monthly burn to a fraction. If your product's core loop is moving files around, model the traffic before choosing infrastructure, because the cloud's convenience premium applies to every gigabyte, every direction, forever. Data-heavy products are precisely the ones where owning the pipes pays.