> Compute is what makes your cloud bill so high.<p>This is simply flat-out not true for 90% of non-AI workloads, both on the startup and enterprise side, and this makes me question the entire article.<p>With compute, you generally have a lot of wiggle room and levers you can pull to optimize your pricing. Even with storage, you can do things like bulk loading, caching, etc to reduce transaction counts.<p>But, with traffic (not just including egress, but also inter-VPC/region traffic)? You're just kinda stuck! or at least until better dramatically compression comes along which doesn't spike things on the compute/memory side of things.<p>In general, compared to other hosting providers, these three (AWS, Azure, GCP) have insanely expensive traffic costs -- <i>an order of magnitude higher than their smaller competition</i>! To make matters worse, egress negotiations are taken off the table before you even get started when discussing enterprise discounts.<p>Be careful when getting started using Activate etc startup funds... that money disappears insanely fast.