Andy Garcia · freelance dev
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Cloud & Regulation

Cloud Exit Fees End in the EU on January 12, 2027. Multi-Cloud Egress Does Not.

October 19, 2026 8 min read

On Monday, October 19, 2026, the Netherlands Authority for Consumers and Markets (ACM) published a draft "Leidraad Cloud", a 52-page guide to the cloud chapters of the EU Data Act, and opened a consultation on it until November 6. The document is in Dutch and calls itself a provisional version. Its press release restates the date that matters: from January 12, 2027, providers may no longer charge customers for switching to another provider.

That date has been written into the regulation since its adoption in December 2023. Article 29 of Regulation (EU) 2023/2854 says it in one line: "From 12 January 2027, providers of data processing services shall not impose any switching charges on the customer for the switching process." Until then, charges may not exceed the costs "directly linked to the switching process."

What the ACM adds is a regulator's reading of the edges, and the edges are where the bills are. I read it from both sides of the contract. I buy cloud for my own products, and I build software that customers use as a service: I am CTO of a LegalTech built on Claude, and I built BidForge, an AI that reads French public tender files for small businesses.

What ends, and what never was a switching charge

The regulation defines switching charges broadly and says they include data egress charges, the fees for pulling your data out over the network to another provider or to your own infrastructure. That is the part that goes to zero.

Two things sit outside the definition. Standard service fees keep running until the contract ends, including during the switch. And early termination penalties survive: recital 89 allows fixed-term contracts "including proportionate early termination penalties." The ACM puts a ceiling on "proportionate": the penalty may not exceed what the customer would have owed had the contract run to its end date. A three-year commitment is still a three-year commitment.

The same recital leaves a door open for paid work. A provider can charge for services beyond its switching obligations, when the customer asks for them and agrees to the price in advance. Where mandatory assistance ends and billable migration work begins is not settled. I expect that line to be where the disputes happen.

Running two clouds can still cost money

The detail I would put in every architecture review is Article 34. When a customer uses two providers in parallel, the provider "may impose data egress charges, but only for the purpose of passing on egress costs incurred, without exceeding such costs." Recital 99 explains why: parallel use is an ongoing flow, not a one-off move, so that permission survives January 12, 2027.

The ACM's example is an ordinary one. A customer runs its CRM with one provider and a project management tool with another. When a sale closes in the CRM, the other tool creates an invoicing task for finance. The two systems exchange data, so that is parallel use.

If your stack is a database on one cloud, an app on another and a model API on a third, January changes your exit bill, not your monthly one. The constraint, in force since September 12, 2025, is that parallel-use egress must not exceed the provider's actual cost, and neither the regulation nor the guide puts a number on that cost. The draft is not fully consistent either: its summary allows at-cost charges for both egress and ingress, while paragraph 116 says only extraction costs may be passed on. That is what a consultation is for.

No grandfathering for old contracts

The regulation has applied since September 12, 2025. The ACM is blunt about contracts signed before that date: they must be amended where needed, with the customer's agreement, and providers that do not amend them "are in breach of the regulation" (my translation). It adds that a switching cost not described in the contract cannot be charged to the customer.

Article 25 sets the minimum content of that contract: a notice period of at most two months, a transitional period of at most 30 calendar days while the service keeps running, a data retrieval period of at least 30 days after it, an exhaustive list of the data and digital assets that can be exported, a clause on full erasure, and the switching charges. If 30 days is technically unfeasible, the provider has 14 working days to say so and propose an alternative of up to seven months. The customer can extend the transitional period once.

One change is pending. The Commission's Digital Omnibus proposal of November 19, 2025 would exempt some contracts concluded on or before September 12, 2025 from the switching obligations, for services whose features were mostly adapted to the customer and for SMEs and small mid-caps that provide services other than infrastructure. Both exemptions keep Article 29, so the fee ban would still apply to those contracts, a point Greenberg Traurig's July 15 analysis of the Council text also makes. Nordia Law, in an October 10 briefing, says the proposal has not been adopted and providers should not rely on it. The ACM says it will revise its guide if the Omnibus becomes law.

Yes, SaaS can be in scope

"Data processing service" sounds like infrastructure, but recital 81 names three delivery models: IaaS, PaaS and SaaS. The ACM adds a purpose test: the customer must use the service for its access to shared computing capacity. A video platform that streams stored files is out, and so is the app that drives a robot vacuum, because the computing serves another function. Software taken as a service rather than bought as a product can be in.

Its CRM example is the one I recognize. A company sells a CRM to a call centre and runs it on another firm's infrastructure. It is a provider to the call centre and a customer of the infrastructure provider, with obligations in the first role and rights in the second.

For sellers, the obligations that bite are technical. Providers other than pure infrastructure must offer open interfaces "free of charge" to their customers and to the other providers serving those customers. The ACM reads "free" as covering both development and maintenance, and "equal" as no discrimination between customers. It allows one escape: skipping an interface that would cost far more than it is worth, for example for a feature an extremely low number of customers use. And since the EU's central repository of interoperability standards is not yet accessible, the ACM notes, exports must come in a commonly used, machine-readable format.

The exemption for custom-built services is narrow: most main features built for one customer, not offered at broad commercial scale from a catalogue. Configurable services are not custom-built, the ACM says.

The big clouds already waived the fee. Read the process.

At AWS and Google Cloud, the exit fee was already gone. On January 12, 2024, Google Cloud announced free data transfer for customers who stop using its platform and migrate their data. AWS waives data transfer out for customers moving off AWS, on request to AWS Support, as credits. Google Cloud also goes past the law on parallel use: its Data Transfer Essentials, for traffic between an organization's own services on Google Cloud and on another listed cloud, is "initially offered at no charge", from its European regions and for a list of supported services. That is a commercial choice, not an obligation.

The process is where the reading pays off. AWS's EU Data Act Addendum asks for a switching request "at least two months prior" to the planned start and sets a 30-day transitional period by default. Under the shared responsibility model, the customer performs the extraction, export and import. A complete switch ends with closing the accounts or deleting the data; skip that step and you reimburse "any switching-related credits or fee waivers." The addendum covers payer accounts whose Account Country is an EU member state.

If a provider still bills egress for an exit, the calendar is worth a look. With a two-month notice period, a switch requested on November 12, 2026 starts its transitional period on January 12, 2027, the day switching charges must stop. A request sent earlier puts at least part of the move in the window where at-cost charges are still allowed.

What I would do before January 12

As a buyer: find the switching clauses in each cloud and SaaS contract and check them against Article 25's numbers. Then sort your data flows into switching and parallel use, because only the first becomes free. If a provider quotes a migration fee for work after January 12, ask which article allows it.

As a seller: write the exit annex now. List the exportable data exhaustively, publish the export formats and the interface documentation in one register, test the export as a customer who is leaving rather than one who stays, and take any switching fee off the price list for January 12. If your API sits behind your top plan, reread paragraph 121 of the ACM draft before a customer does.

The regulation takes the switching fee out of leaving. It does not make leaving easy, and it does not make living in two clouds free. Those remain engineering problems.

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