Cloud storage costs are proving to be an ongoing challenge for IT leaders, with unexpected fees and budget overruns slowing down business operations.
According to Wasabi’s 2025 Global Cloud Storage Index, 62% of organizations exceeded their planned cloud storage budgets last year, and 56% reported IT or business delays due to storage-related fees.
Although cloud storage pricing and fee structures may continue to simplify, large hyperscalers dominating the market haven’t shown much willingness to change.
“As a result, many organizations are embracing multiple cloud storage providers to create their own economics instead of waiting for their provider to lower prices or minimize fees,” said Andrew Smith, director of strategy and market Intelligence at Wasabi.
Unexpected costs related to storage are common, with two major factors standing out—fees and inaccurate usage forecasts.
According to Smith, 89% of organizations cited fees such as data operations charges and API call costs as the biggest contributors to exceeding cloud budgets.
“Egress fees certainly contribute to excess budgets, but they’re just one of many hidden charges,” Smith explained. “The reality is that data movement is essential, yet organizations are forced to deal with additional financial and operational complexity every time they migrate or access data.”
He noted unplanned usage plays a major role, with many companies ending up migrating more applications and data than originally expected.
Sometimes this happens because a migration went faster than expected, so the next project was accelerated, throwing off budget plans.
Other times, organizations see unexpected benefits from moving data to the cloud and expand their footprint sooner than forecasted.
Ari Weil, cloud evangelist at Akamai, pointed out that many organizations lack visibility into their cloud storage spending.
“A recent report highlighted that over 20% of organizations have little to no idea how much different aspects of their business cost when it comes to the cloud,” Weil said. “Many teams set storage policies once and forget about them, leading to ballooning costs that spiral out of control in the background.”
Egress Fees are Slowing Down IT Initiatives
One of the most widely criticized aspects of cloud storage pricing is egress fees—charges for moving data out of a cloud provider’s ecosystem. These fees often lead to unexpected cost spikes and slow down key IT and business initiatives.
“Egress fees are a cloud tax that penalizes businesses for moving their own data,” Weil said. “Companies often face sticker shock when AI, analytics, or disaster recovery workloads trigger massive volumes of data transfers, leading to unplanned costs.”
Smith agreed that egress fees are a major problem, noting that they are the most disruptive to IT and business operations.
The survey found 56% of organizations said they experienced IT or business delays due to egress and data access fees.
“Data mobility is only increasing, so IT leaders should prioritize choosing a cloud storage provider that eliminates these fees entirely,” Smith said.
Scott Wheeler, cloud practice lead at Asperitas, added that organizations must take a proactive approach to managing these costs.
“You can manage network egress fees by analyzing traffic flow and optimizing how data moves within your cloud network,” Wheeler said.
Using dedicated connectivity services like AWS Direct Connect or Azure ExpressRoute can be a cost-effective alternative to VPNs or public internet egress, especially at higher data transfer volumes.
Cloud Pricing Models Built for Lock-In, Not Transparency
Many cloud providers lure customers in with attractive base storage rates while burying actual costs in complex pricing models filled with access and transfer fees.
“Cloud pricing models are often designed for lock-in rather than cost transparency,” Weil said. “Many providers highlight cheap base storage rates but bury the true costs in complex access and transfer fees.
To make matters worse, a cloud bill can contain hundreds of millions or even billions of rows of data, making it nearly impossible for IT teams to fully understand their spending.
Smith argued that cloud storage pricing needs to be far more predictable.
“Organizations cannot effectively plan usage when pricing models are this opaque,” he said.
From his perspective, providers need to offer simplified tiering structures, clear role-based access policies, and straightforward data management features like lifecycle management, versioning and replication.
IT Leaders Fighting Back
Rather than waiting for cloud providers to change their pricing models, many organizations are taking matters into their own hands.
“A big part of the problem is that cloud storage pricing is still rooted in a centralized model that no longer reflects how businesses actually use data,” Weil explained. “Organizations need to move data closer to users and applications, yet they’re still being charged as if everything should live in a single, centralized data center.”
To counteract cloud storage pricing challenges, organizations are implementing a range of strategic approaches.
Many companies are embracing multi-cloud strategies, diversifying their cloud storage providers to avoid vendor lock-in and negotiate better rates.
This approach gives businesses more flexibility and bargaining power when managing costs.
At the same time, cost monitoring automation is becoming a critical tool, allowing IT teams to track cloud expenses in real-time and receive alerts before cost overruns become unmanageable.
“AI will play an increasing role in reducing storage costs by identifying optimizations in cloud storage tiers and data retention,” Wheeler noted. “Hybrid storage strategies will continue to allow organizations to find the correct storage platform for their data.”
