$250K
AWS Data Transfer — The Hidden Tax

STOP
PAYING
PER
BYTE.

AWS charges you for every gigabyte that leaves their network. High-traffic services — ad tech, APIs, media, data pipelines — can accumulate $50K–$250K/month or more in data transfer costs alone. We migrate you to infrastructure that doesn't bill this way.

Get a Free Analysis Estimate Your Savings ↓
$0.09
AWS cost per GB out
~$0.00
Flat server cost per GB
60–80%
Typical infra cost reduction
Real
Live case: $200K+/mo → fixed rate
The Problem

AWS BILLS YOU FOR TRAFFIC. EVERY SINGLE REQUEST.

Prebid server, SSPs, ad exchanges, media delivery, real-time bidding — these workloads are designed to generate massive outbound traffic. Every bid request has a body. Every bidder response comes back out. That's not a bug in your architecture. It's just how these systems work.

AWS knows this. At $0.09/GB for data transfer out to the internet, a service with heavy data out can easily hit $50K–$180K per month in transfer costs alone — before compute, storage, or anything else.

The painful part: you're not getting anything extra for that money. You're just paying a per-byte toll for using the internet through AWS. There's no reason it has to work this way.

EC2 Compute (r6i.4xl × 12)$14,800
RDS / ElastiCache$6,200
Load Balancers + NAT$3,100
S3 + CloudWatch$2,400
⚠ Data Transfer Out$162,000
Monthly Total~$188K
Data Transfer
86%
Compute
8%
Database
3%
Other
3%
Who This Is For

YOU'RE A CANDIDATE IF YOUR SERVICE DOES ANY OF THESE

📡
RTB / Ad Tech / Prebid
Every bid request fans out to multiple bidders with full request bodies — multiplying your outbound traffic per user impression.
🔗
High-Volume APIs
REST or GraphQL APIs serving millions of calls/day with non-trivial response payloads — analytics, personalization, recommendations.
🎥
Media & Streaming
Video, audio, or image delivery at scale where every byte served is a byte billed — CDN costs notwithstanding.
🔄
Data Pipelines
ETL, sync, or event streaming workloads that move large datasets between systems — especially to external partners or customers.
📊
SaaS Data Exports
Products where customers pull reports, exports, or bulk data regularly — each export is directly billed by AWS.
💸
AWS Bill > $50K/mo
If your monthly AWS bill is already $50K+ and data transfer is a line item you wince at, migration ROI is almost certain to be positive.
Live Case Study

WE DIDN'T JUST DESIGN THIS. WE RAN IT.

Ad tech / RTB stack — anonymous — migration completed over 12 months in production

The company ran a real-time bidding platform: an ad request comes in, fans out simultaneously to 15–40 demand partners, each receiving the full bid request body. Every partner that responds sends a bid back. The winning bid gets returned to the publisher. A lot of bytes moving in both directions, at high frequency, all day.

On AWS, this translated directly into a data transfer bill that dwarfed everything else — compute, database, storage, all of it combined. The servers weren't doing much compute-heavy work. They were mostly routing traffic. But AWS bills for traffic.

"The servers were fine. The bill was the problem. We were paying AWS a per-byte toll on traffic that had nothing to do with their compute capacity."

The migration moved the entire stack to dedicated bare-metal servers with a flat bandwidth allowance. The architecture — HA, redundancy, failover, database replication — was rebuilt equivalent. Production traffic ran on AWS throughout. The cutover was gradual, DNS-based, validated at each step.

After the transition: the data transfer line item dropped to zero. The entire bill became a fixed monthly server cost.

AWS Bill (pre-migration)
~$250K/mo
Data Transfer % of Bill
70–80%
New Infrastructure Bill
~$50K/mo
Data Transfer Cost (new)
$0
Annual Savings
~$2.4M
Production Downtime
0
Migration Duration
12 months
Migration Timeline
AWS only
Parallel / gradual cutover
Flat-rate infra
Production ran on AWS throughout. New environment built in parallel. Traffic shifted gradually — 10%, 25%, 50%, 100% — with rollback available at each step.
Savings Estimator

HOW MUCH COULD YOU SAVE?

Enter your total AWS bill and either your data transfer percentage or your outbound volume — the other field updates automatically using AWS's actual tiered pricing.

USD / mo
%
$
/mo
← % and $ stay in sync with each other
TB / mo
← or edit this to recalculate %
AWS PRICING USED:
First 100 GB/mo → free
Next 10 TB/mo → $0.09 / GB
Next 40 TB/mo → $0.085 / GB
Next 100 TB/mo → $0.07 / GB
Beyond 150 TB/mo → $0.05 / GB
Current AWS (data transfer)$140,000
Current AWS (everything else)$60,000
Flat infra (replaces all AWS)~$18,000
Data transfer cost (new)$0 (flat rate)
Estimated new monthly total~$78,000
Monthly savings~$122,000
Estimated Annual Savings
$1,464,000
This is money going straight back to your business.

⚠ Estimates assume equivalent bare-metal infrastructure at 115% of your non-DT AWS spend (same capacity, slight overhead). Your entire AWS bill is replaced — data transfer cost drops to $0. Migration complexity and your specific architecture will affect final numbers. Contact us for a real analysis.

The Process

HOW THE MIGRATION WORKS

01
Audit & Analysis
We review your AWS billing data, architecture diagrams, and traffic patterns to identify exactly how much you're spending on data transfer vs. everything else.
02
Architecture Design
We design an equivalent bare-metal or flat-rate cloud environment — with the same HA, redundancy, and performance characteristics your service requires.
03
Parallel Build
We stand up the new environment alongside your existing AWS setup. No risk, no downtime — your production traffic keeps running on AWS throughout.
04
Traffic Migration
Gradual, controlled traffic shift using DNS or load balancer weights. We validate performance and stability at each step before cutting fully over.
05
AWS Wind-Down
Once you're confident in the new environment, we help you systematically shut down AWS resources — turning off the meter and locking in your savings.
How We Work Together

WHAT WORKING WITH US LOOKS LIKE

Three stages, each with a clear deliverable. No open-ended retainers. You can stop after any stage — though most people don't.
Stage 01
FREE COST ANALYSIS
No cost — no commitment
Share your AWS bill (or just estimates) and we'll produce a real savings analysis specific to your architecture and traffic profile. Within 48 hours, you'll know whether migration makes financial sense — with actual numbers, not a pitch deck.
  • Breakdown of your DT cost vs. everything else
  • Estimated flat-infra equivalent cost
  • Projected monthly and annual savings
  • Go / no-go recommendation with reasoning
Stage 02
MIGRATION PLAN
Deep-dive into your architecture and produce a complete migration plan: provider selection, environment design, cutover strategy, rollback plan, and effort estimate. A standalone deliverable — your team can execute it independently if you prefer.
  • Full architecture design for target environment
  • Provider recommendation with justification
  • Cutover playbook with rollback procedures
  • Risk assessment and mitigation steps
  • Detailed effort and timeline estimate
Stage 03
HANDS-ON MIGRATION
Fixed-fee or milestone-based
We execute the migration alongside your team — or largely for you. We build the environment, handle the cutover, validate performance, and stay on until you've wound down AWS and your bill reflects the new reality.
  • Full environment build and configuration
  • Parallel testing and performance validation
  • Gradual traffic cutover with monitoring
  • AWS wind-down and final cost verification
  • Runbooks and ops documentation handoff

Prefer to keep it in-house? We also offer a lightweight advisory track — your team leads the migration, we review the plan and check in weekly. Ask us about it.

Honest Answers

THE HARD QUESTIONS

Things your engineers will ask. Answered directly.
"What about auto-scaling? AWS scales instantly."
+
This is the real tradeoff — and it's worth being direct about. Bare-metal does not auto-scale. New server provisioning takes 24–48 hours. If you have genuinely unpredictable, spiky traffic, this matters.

But ask yourself: does your traffic actually require it? Most high-DTO workloads — RTB, API, media delivery — have highly predictable traffic curves. Ad spend doesn't spike 10x overnight. You provision for peak plus buffer and run flat. That's fine, and it's how large-scale ad tech infrastructure is run at many companies.
⚠ If you genuinely have unpredictable 10x traffic spikes with no advance notice, a full bare-metal migration may not be right for you. We'll tell you that in the analysis phase.
"What if a server dies? AWS has managed failover."
+
You design for N+1 exactly as you would on AWS — just without paying per-AZ. You run multiple servers across different physical locations. HAProxy handles load balancing and health checks. If a node dies, traffic routes to the survivors. This is the same pattern you'd use on EC2 — it's just your own load balancer instead of an ALB. Postgres streaming replication, Redis Sentinel — these are battle-tested patterns that work fine on bare-metal.
"Won't latency to our ad partners be worse outside AWS?"
+
It depends on provider selection and geography — which is why this is part of the design phase. Providers like OVH and Hetzner have substantial peering with major networks. In practice, for most US and EU ad tech workloads, latency is comparable to AWS. We validate this before any production traffic moves — you get real latency data against your actual partners from the new environment before any cutover.
⚠ If you're running in regions with limited provider options (Southeast Asia, South America), this requires more careful planning. We'll flag it.
"What if we need to scale aggressively in 6 months?"
+
Planned scaling is fine — you order servers with lead time, same as capacity planning on AWS. The constraint is unplanned scaling. If you're in a growth phase where you expect rapid, unpredictable traffic changes, we'd recommend a hybrid approach: move the high-DTO baseline workload to flat-rate infra, keep a smaller AWS footprint for burst capacity. You still save the majority of your DT cost while retaining elastic capacity for spikes.
"We use RDS, ElastiCache, SQS. That's a lot to replace."
+
More work upfront, yes. But none of it is novel: Postgres on Linux, Redis on Linux, RabbitMQ. These are battle-tested stacks that run a significant portion of the internet. The real question is operational: who manages them going forward? We document everything thoroughly and can provide ongoing support, or hand off cleanly to your ops team. You're trading a recurring per-query AWS tax for a one-time ops investment.
"What if the migration breaks something in production?"
+
This is why we do gradual cutover with rollback at every step — no big-bang migrations. At no point is production 100% committed to the new environment until you've validated performance, latency, and error rates at meaningful traffic percentages. If something is wrong at 10% traffic, we roll back in minutes — AWS is still running, still handling 90% of your traffic. We've done this on a live ad stack. The playbook exists because we wrote it doing this for real.
Industries & Use Cases

COMMON SERVICES WE MIGRATE

Prebid Server / Header Bidding Wrappers
Fan-out to 10–50 bidders per request with full payloads — data transfer multiplier is extreme
Ad Tech
Supply-Side Platforms (SSPs) & DSPs
OpenRTB traffic at scale, bid responses in both directions
Ad Tech
High-Volume REST / GraphQL APIs
Millions of calls/day with non-trivial JSON response bodies
API
Analytics & Event Collection Pipelines
Ingest high, egress to warehouses or customers is also high
Data
Video / Media / Image Delivery Services
Every byte served is a billable egress byte
Media
SaaS Platforms with Bulk Data Exports
Customer-facing data pulls can be surprisingly large at scale
SaaS
Game Backends & Real-Time Multiplayer
State sync and matchmaking at scale generates substantial egress
Gaming

LET'S SEE
WHAT YOU'RE
ACTUALLY PAYING.

Share your details and we'll turn around a real savings analysis — specific to your architecture, traffic volume, and requirements — within 48 hours. No commitment, no pitch deck fluff.

yukshy@yukshy.com
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USD/mo
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