Egress fees are a hidden tax on every data product. 

They limit where you can sell, how fast you can grow, and how much margin you keep.

Starting today, Bobsled radically reduces that tax—forever. We’re thrilled to announce egress-free sharing in Bobsled. Teams that build data products can now radically reduce the cost of cloud data feeds by eliminating egress fees for data shared through Bobsled.

Zero-egress sharing is a foundational part of Bobsled’s next-generation data product lakehouse.

This powerful new architecture allows data engineering teams to customize and share data products anywhere in the cloud. Now, thanks to a partnership with Cloudflare, teams that build in Bobsled can deliver on that promise without exploding their cloud bill.

“In the age of AI, data products need to be accessible everywhere in the cloud,” said Phillip Jones, Group Product Manager at Cloudflare. “We’re incredibly excited about Bobsled because it delivers on the promise of cloud interoperability that Cloudflare has advocated for years by eliminating egress fees. This means teams can access data products with the tools they already use across any cloud or platform."

The fast track

Who it’s for

• Data engineering teams under pressure to scale their feeds while cutting infrastructure costs.
• Data product managers launching multi-cloud feeds, but blocked by the cost of getting started in new clouds or regions.

What it does

• Reduces the cost of traditional pipeline-based data feeds by up to 90% 

• Eliminates the incremental cost of adding a new destination once data is in Bobsled

How it works

• Replicate data assets into Bobsled’s egress-free data product lakehouse, powered by Cloudflare R2, from any cloud storage or data warehouse.
• Build custom products (filters, columns, joins) using our zero copy data product engine. 
• Share products to customers in every region of every cloud without generating egress. 

Deep Dive: Understanding the Egress Problem

What are egress fees?

Egress fees are a pillar of the modern cloud business model. Alongside storage and compute, most cloud service providers (CSPs) charge users to move data beyond their own platform. Typically, egress is charged when data is moved to another cloud on a per GB basis.

Why is egress such a major issue for data product teams?

Most internal data teams share a common infrastructure. That means they typically only see egress when they migrate to tools outside of the CSP ecosystem. It’s annoying, but manageable when creating internal-facing data products.

That’s not the case with external-facing data products. If a customer works in a different cloud, there’s no alternative: the data needs to get there. Egress is no longer an incentive to stay in an ecosystem; it’s now effectively a tax on every new customer that does not work in the same region. 

The consequences for data companies are significant.

They’re forced to either push that cost onto customers by only delivering within their region or meet customers where they work and materially impact their costs of goods sold.

In both cases, it radically increases the total cost of ownership for data products.

How Bobsled Eliminates Egress Fees

Bobsled is built on our next-generation data product lakehouse architecture. Instead of simply moving data between a source and destination, Bobsled provides an interoperability layer that unlocks one-to-many sharing anywhere in the cloud.

In a traditional ETL architecture, egress is paid every time data is shared with a customer. If you deliver the same 10 TB data product to customers in 4 regions of Snowflake, you pay the same egress every time.

With Bobsled, you pay once.

Since Bobsled’s data storage layer is built on Cloudflare R2, incremental movement of data generates no egress fees. This means that egress scales with your overall data estate, not the number of customers consuming it.

What Is Cloudflare R2?

Cloudflare R2 is an object storage service designed as an alternative to Amazon S3, but with a key differentiator: zero egress fees. It’s part of Cloudflare’s broader effort to make the internet more open and affordable by removing costly data transfer charges that are common with major cloud providers.

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