Egress Cost Ceiling

Egress Cost Ceiling is the practice of pricing a client analytics retainer against the worst-case data-exit bill before choosing a warehouse architecture, not after. Most warehouse decisions get made on storage rate per terabyte, which is the smaller number. The ceiling that actually constrains an agency is what it costs to move query results, dashboard refreshes, and client exports out of the platform each month. Flat-rate object storage changes that math: Wasabi prices without egress or API fees, and Backblaze B2 charges $6.95/TB/month with free egress, so a reporting product that refreshes hourly stops generating a variable cost line. Distributed and columnar options shift the ceiling elsewhere, into tuning labor or compute hours. For agencies, the framework converts an infrastructure choice into a margin decision: model the exit volume for each client dashboard, then pick the architecture whose ceiling sits below the retainer.