The exit-fee argument died; check your switching math

Since March 2024, customers leaving AWS can request free data transfer out. Google and Microsoft made equivalent moves the same season, nudged by European regulation. The exit toll, for a full departure, is gone.

Two years on, we still see it in decision documents. "Egress costs make leaving impractical" appears in platform selections, consolidation proposals and renewal defenses, priced at rates that stopped applying in 2024. A dead number is doing live work.

To be precise about what died: the one-time exit toll for moving your data out when leaving. What did not die is operational egress, the ongoing tax on data crossing boundaries while you stay, which still shapes architecture and still favors keeping compute near data.

The action is a half-day: find every standing decision that cited exit egress, and re-run the switching math with the toll at zero. Some decisions survive; data gravity, retraining and integration costs were always the larger share. Some do not, and the ones that flip are leverage at your next renewal, which is worth knowing before the vendor's calendar invite arrives, not after.

Lock-in did not end in 2024; the real tradeoffs were never mostly about the toll. But one of its numbers did die, and decisions built on expired numbers age into folklore. Audit yours.