To move bytes out of network, you need more than a transit contract. You need routers, you need people to operate them. All this is absent from Cloudflare's blog post. With the example provided on South Korea, the conclusion should be that the egress fees are only marginally infuenced by the transit cost.

The blog post on egress speaks to that - but the true scale at which the major clouds buy hardware and deploy it - just changes the dynamics here. We're (collectively) not used to seeing products marked up to such an extent.

The $/Mbps prices there - about $6k/Tbps in the US - are based in reality and are absolutely reflective of what it costs, hardware, software, redundancy and all - for an effectively 1Tbps pipe.

If you're pricing as $/GB on top of that capacity and keep it reasonably heavily utilized—which can be hard given diurnal demand—the margins only get better! Products like Glacier (S3) exist to fill exactly those gaps.

(Note: currently work at Cloudflare, but wasn't part of this blog and I've been around a bit...)

Yet CloudFlare is able to do it for free up to a point, and at a lower-than-AWS fee after that. It might not be the exact figure but there is most definitely a huge markup there.