The EU Data Act puts a hard date on cloud pricing: from January 12, 2027, providers may no longer charge any switching fee when a customer moves to another provider — and that explicitly includes data egress charges. This is not a cap. It is zero.

The Timeline: Two and a Half Years of Transition Are Already Gone

The rule landed in stages. From January 11, 2024 to January 12, 2027 switching charges may still be levied, but only up to the direct costs the provider actually incurs in assisting the migration — meaning pricing that treats egress as a profit centre already fell out of compliance on that first date. From January 12, 2027, even passing those costs on is prohibited.

The scope is worth stating plainly: it binds providers offering services to EU customers, not only vendors headquartered in the EU. Conversely, if neither you nor your customers are in the EU, the rule does not automatically hand you the same right — though a global vendor rarely maintains two wildly different egress prices for the same product, so market pricing tends to converge. Read it as a direction-of-travel indicator, not as a legal instrument you personally hold.

The Lock-In Was Never the Monthly Fee

Everyone compares monthly prices when choosing. What actually prevents you from leaving is usually one of three other things:

  • Per-GB egress billing: data is cheap while it sits still and expensive when it moves. That's a structure where you may leave at any time, provided you pay to leave.
  • Managed services with one supplier: hosted databases, queues, auth, function runtimes. The deeper the integration, the more code a migration rewrites.
  • Undocumented dependencies: internal endpoints hard-coded into the application, settings that exist only because someone clicked them in a console, IAM policies nobody wrote down. None of it shows up on the invoice, and all of it dominates the migration timeline.

Three Things You Can Do Today

  • Price your own exit once: add up object storage, databases and backups, multiply by your provider's per-GB egress rate, then add the person-days to rebuild the environment. That number is what leaving costs you right now, and most teams are surprised the first time they calculate it.
  • Keep backups at a different vendor: the simplest proof that you can migrate is a complete, restorable backup sitting with somebody else. It answers the migration drill and the single-provider failure question at the same time.
  • Draw the dependency map: list every third party — DNS, CDN, certificate issuance, object storage, email, payments — and annotate each with how long replacing it would take. Anything over a week is a real lock-in point.

Why a Fixed Bandwidth Allowance Is Simpler Here

Traditional VPS billing differs structurally from metered egress: the bandwidth allowance is part of the plan, so moving data out doesn't generate a separate line item. That doesn't make a VPS "better" than a public cloud — they solve different problems. But if your concern is whether a future move gets blocked by a bill, a fixed allowance makes that cost predictable from day one. SharkCloud publishes the resource specs and bandwidth allowance for every plan on the plan pages, with Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong and US nodes ready to deploy — no sales conversation required to move in or out.