The price of bandwidth is still confusing

Questions / Help
1

In this answer from May 2022, the user ignoramous quoted a blog post by Kurt (written in Dec 2020) saying that the outbound transfer is charged at edge, not where the VMs are located.

And in this reply from Kurt himself, made in April 2023, he says that outbound transfer is charged by the region where the VM is located.

From what I understood in this recent post about Granular Bandwidth Billing, by opting in you are charged for the “hop between” regions, but not with the old billing model?

To clarify, in 2025, how is the outbound transfer billed?

  1. Assuming that my application is only active in the North America region.
  2. Assuming that egress to public internet cost in North America region is $0.02 per GB.
  3. Assuming that egress to public internet cost in South America region is $0.04 per GB.

If a user located in South America uses my application, will I be charged $0.02 or $0.04 per GB?

2

bw
bw834×1248 38.5 KB

We bill “per hop” now. Traffic in the same region is free. Hops to other regions are very cheap. So your scenario looks like this.

3

Perfect! Thank you very much for the clarification!

Just one last question, is there any way to “disable” the use of proxys if I want to pay for cheaper traffic or don’t mind the higher response times (delay)?

4

It’s not well documented but there are some regions (like iad) that let you assign a regional IP to the app. fly ips allocate-v4 --region iad, for example. Since we only announce those IPs in iad, traffic there should never hit another region.

If you run another app in another region that uses that IP it will still have the cross region data fee, though.