For a decade, the cheapest way to keep a cloud customer was to make leaving expensive. Egress fees did that quietly. Moving your data out cost money, so most teams never priced the move at all.
In Europe, that era has a fixed end date. From January 12, 2027, cloud providers can no longer charge EU customers switching fees, and the EU Data Act counts data egress as part of those fees. Until then, providers may charge only the direct cost of the switch. The Act also caps the notice a provider can demand at two months and the transition at 30 days.
Regulators are pressing from a second direction too. In June, the European Commission told Amazon and Microsoft it believes their cloud services should be designated "gatekeepers" under the Digital Markets Act. On October 2, Bloomberg reported the Commission is preparing to finalize that designation, possibly in November, with interoperability and egress practices under scrutiny.
The hyperscalers are already adjusting. AWS updated its exit-credit terms on October 8, and Google and Microsoft have their own programs for customers who leave.
Free to leave is not the same as able to leave
Here is the part most coverage skips. The fee ban covers the one-time move when you switch providers. It does not cover the egress you pay every day when your data lives in one cloud and your applications run in another. And it does nothing about the hardest cost of all: rewriting everything built on a proprietary platform.
The hyperscalers' own lobby said as much this week. A CCIA Europe-funded study of the EU's proposed sovereignty rules found that code rewriting and re-architecting account for 69 percent of the estimated cost of moving off US cloud providers. Read that number carefully. It says the expensive part of leaving was never the data transfer. It was the dependency.
So in 2027, a European enterprise will be able to move its data for free. Whether it can move its analytics is a different question, answered by choices it is making today.
Three questions to ask before the deadline
- If you had to move your warehouse in 30 days, could you? The Data Act gives you a 30-day transition window. If your SQL, pipelines and security model only run on one provider's proprietary service, 30 days is a rewrite, not a migration.
- Where does compute sit relative to your data? The exit fee goes away. Cross-cloud query traffic does not. Architectures that keep compute next to the data avoid a recurring bill no regulation will cancel.
- Is your platform portable, or just your files? Open file formats help. But dashboards, workloads, governance policies and tuned performance are what take months to rebuild.
Portability is an architecture decision, not a contract clause
Regulation can remove a fee. It cannot make a proprietary service portable. That has to be designed in.
This is the case for a data platform that runs the same way wherever you deploy it: in your data center, in a private or sovereign cloud, or in any public cloud. When the SQL, the security model and the operational tooling are identical across locations, switching becomes a deployment decision rather than a re-architecture project. That is the principle Yellowbrick is built around.
The EU is about to make leaving free. The organizations that benefit most will be the ones whose architecture lets them actually go.