Egress Costs

Egress costs refer to the fees incurred when data transfers out of a cloud provider’s storage to another location. For example, to a user’s browser or a processing server. When using Encord, egress costs arise when media files are accessed for annotation, display, or computation.

To minimize these costs, Encord optimizes data transfers by:

• Allowing users to register media with metadata and embeddings, avoiding unnecessary file ingestion.
• Performing searches on metadata instead of the actual media files.
• Streaming only the visible portions of videos and thumbnails.
• Utilizing local caching to prevent repeated data transfers during annotation.

Local caching prevents repeated egress costs when revisiting the same section of a video during annotation.

Scenario	Egress Cost Impact
Data Registration	No egress cost if users provide media metadata and embeddings, as files are not ingested. If metadata is not provided then Encord downloads the data once for processing.
Searching	Searches are performed on metadata stored in Encord’s servers, incurring no egress cost.
Search Results	Data is streamed only for thumbnails in view; for videos, only visible frames are loaded.
Video Annotation	Egress costs apply only to the section of the video being viewed/annotated, with some buffering allowance. Local caching prevents repeated egress costs when revisiting the same section.
Index/Active Display	Minimal egress cost, as filtering is based on precomputed metrics/embeddings.
Visual Curation in Active	Small data transfer since only selected frames are displayed.
Metric/Embedding Computation	If processed on Encord’s side, egress cost equals the data size. Needs confirmation on frame ingestion. No egress cost if users provide media metadata and embeddings.
Cost	1GB of 1080p footage costs ~$0.10 in egress.