UK cloud services provider Civo has said that it will abolish all data egress fees for customers, unconditionally.

According to Civo, this offer goes beyond that which is being proposed by the hyperscalers.

The company said in a statement: “The end of all egress fees on Civo comes with no requirements or limits, with businesses empowered to flexibly move their data between Civo and other platforms to suit their priorities,” said the company, in a statement. “This is in contrast to other providers that only ended egress fees with significant caveats, including requiring a customer to exit the platform.”

The other providers referenced are Google, Microsoft, and AWS, all of which have eased data egress fee requirements over the last few months.

Google was the first to make such a move, getting rid of its egress fees in January 2024 for customers looking to exit the provider. Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS) followed suit in March, with Azure taking a similar hard stance on exiting the provider to qualify. AWS does not require a full exit from its services but does have other stipulations including a rigorous approval process and allows only 60 days to complete the migration.

The decision to remove egress fees seems to have been motivated by the upcoming EU Data Act which requires public and private cloud computing service providers to remove "obstacles to effective switching" between their own and competing cloud services, including commercial, contractual, technical, or organizational hurdles.

On Civo's part, it is also likely due to the UK Competition and Markets Authority's (CMA's) on-going investigation into the cloud market which includes egress fees in its scope of research.

Civo CEO Mark Boost said to ComputerWeekly: “Cloud should be fair, equitable, and open. If it’s not supporting business growth, then it’s not living up to its promises. Businesses should have the flexibility to move between providers based on their needs."

Civo is a cloud-native service provider offering services using the Kubernetes containerized software platform. In September of last year, Deep Green announced that it would be running Civo cloud services on the data centers it uses to heat swimming pools. The company already has a similar agreement with the digital boiler company Heata.