AWS announced it is making data transfers to other cloud providers free, joining Google Cloud in killing exit fees.

Google announced it was eliminating exit fees in mid-January, leading many to wonder if/when AWS and Microsoft would follow suit. AWS how now joined Google Cloud, announcing the news in a blog post:

We believe this choice must include the one to migrate your data to another cloud provider or on-premises. That’s why, starting today, we’re waiving data transfer out to the internet (DTO) charges when you want to move outside of AWS.

Over 90 percent of our customers already incur no data transfer expenses out of AWS because we provide 100 gigabytes per month free from AWS Regions to the internet. This includes traffic from Amazon EC2, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Application Load Balancer, among others. In addition, we offer one terabyte of free data transfer out of Amazon CloudFront every month.

If you need more than 100 gigabytes of data transfer out per month while transitioning, you can contact AWS Support to ask for free DTO rates for the additional data. It’s necessary to go through support because you make hundreds of millions of data transfers each day, and we generally do not know if the data transferred out to the internet is a normal part of your business or a one-time transfer as part of a switch to another cloud provider or on premises.

As Reuters points out, a likely reason for the move is the EU’s upcoming Data Act, aimed at making forcing companies to make it easier for customers to switch services.