The bill doesn't match the usage.
Egress fees are what cloud providers charge to move data out of their storage — billed separately from, and on top of, what you already pay to store it. Storage capacity is only about half of what you're actually paying for: Wasabi's 2025 Global Cloud Storage Index found that raw capacity makes up 51% of the average cloud storage bill — the rest is networking, API calls, and egress, all scaling independently of how much data you actually store.
It gets worse once AI enters the picture. Data that sat untouched for a year, priced into the cheapest storage tier, suddenly has value for training or analytics — and every reactivation triggers retrieval and egress charges. That's the pattern behind the 62% of organizations that overran their cloud storage budget in 2024. Pull 50 TB out of Amazon S3 in a single month and you're looking at roughly $4,400 in egress alone, before NAT gateway or cross-AZ charges.
Six reasons storage teams repatriate to TrueNAS
Most teams reach out mid-renewal — after the second or third unexpected line item on the cloud bill.
Predictable spend, not a metered surprise.
Cloud storage bills you for capacity, requests, and egress — three variables that move independently. 95% of IT leaders managing 250TB+ in the public cloud got hit with charges they didn't plan for. TrueNAS runs on all-inclusive licensing: known cost before you sign, year one through year eight.
No exit tax on your own data.
Egress fees are the single biggest reason organizations feel stuck with their provider — 55% name it as the top barrier to switching. TrueNAS runs on OpenZFS, an open, portable format. Moving data off your own hardware doesn't require a bill.
File, block, and object — one platform.
Public cloud object storage covers S3 well. Get to file or block and you're adding a managed service — EFS, Azure Files, EBS — each with its own bill. TrueNAS runs NFS, SMB, iSCSI, and S3-compatible object storage from one platform, without migrating data to get there.
Access patterns change. Your bill shouldn't punish you for it.
Object storage tiering assumes data goes cold and stays cold. It doesn't — especially with AI pulling old datasets back into use. Every reactivation triggers retrieval and egress on a cloud platform. On TrueNAS, accessing your own data isn't a billable event.
Ransomware resilience built into the storage layer.
Immutable snapshots and air-gapped replication are native to OpenZFS. No separate line item for cyber recovery, and no reliance on a provider's shared-responsibility model to cover you.
You own the hardware. You own the lifecycle.
Cloud storage is a subscription you never stop paying. TrueNAS runs on a six-to-eight-year deployment lifecycle — buy it, run it, budget around it. No recurring meter, no forced renewal every time usage shifts.
A vendor went quiet. 70 years of programming is stuck.
In August 2026, Nine PBS — a public television station — sued Iron Mountain to get its own data back. The station had stored 50 TB of archival material, representing 70 years of programming and organizational history, with a cloud storage vendor called Open Source Storage (OSS). When Nine PBS went to renew its contract, OSS never responded and cut off access. The company had gone quiet, its website had disappeared, and it was later found delinquent with the Colorado Secretary of State. OSS had hosted the data with Iron Mountain, which first declined to confirm it held the data, then admitted it did, then refused to release it — arguing OSS, not Nine PBS, owned it.
A court has since ruled Nine PBS has the right to its own data. Getting it back is still an open fight.
This is the exit-tax problem in its most extreme form: not a bigger invoice, but no invoice at all — because the vendor holding your data stopped answering the phone. Read the full story →
He's renting 2.5+ PB a year. Leadership wants it consolidated.
An IT director at a higher-education institution is renting north of 2.5 PB a year on Dropbox — roughly $140,000 annually — and leadership wants it consolidated onto one supported, standard platform instead of a patchwork of cloud services.
He doesn't need convincing that the platform works. He needs one supported standard he can put his name on.
"Our leadership is looking for a consolidated, supported model."
IT Director, Higher Education
"We know TrueNAS is superior to Synology and QNAP — it's not even close."
IT Director, Higher Education
TrueNAS Enterprise holds a 4.9★ rating on Gartner Peer Insights across more than 100 verified reviews, with 92% of customers rating sales and support 5 out of 5 — and it's been named a Gartner Customers' Choice twice.
"I have been using TrueNAS for nearly 15 years. In all the years of using this platform, I have never had any issues. There are very few products or companies I promote — but this is one of them."
Director of IT, Education · United States
"The system is rock-solid, intuitive to manage, and delivers enterprise-level reliability without enterprise-level complexity."
Public Cloud Storage vs. TrueNAS Enterprise
Based on published AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud pricing documentation and third-party research, as of August 2026.
Comparison based on publicly available AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud pricing documentation, and third-party research: Wasabi 2025 Global Cloud Storage Index (Vanson Bourne, 1,600 respondents); Backblaze/Dimensional Research, "The Hidden Cost of Cloud Storage" (403 orgs storing 250TB+, 2025); Barclays CIO Survey. Cloud provider pricing changes frequently — verify current rates directly with providers.
We won't tell you cloud storage is always wrong.
TrueNAS Enterprise is the clear choice when…
- Steady-state, predictable-access data: backups, VM datastores, AI training corpora, media, active archive
- Data volumes above roughly 250 TB, where retrieval and egress risk compounds fastest
- Regulatory, compliance, or data residency requirements needing customer-controlled infrastructure
- File, block, and object without managing three separate cloud services and three separate bills
- Predictable multi-year budgeting matters more than pay-as-you-go flexibility
- Ransomware resilience needs to live in the storage layer, not a bolt-on product
Public cloud storage may still fit better when…
- Small, highly variable, or bursty datasets where true elasticity outweighs egress risk
- You need a global CDN or edge delivery network you have no plan to build yourself
- No in-house infrastructure team, and no appetite to manage physical hardware at all
- Multi-region redundancy across a provider's global footprint, without capital investment
Don't take our word for it
TrueNAS figures sourced from Gartner Peer Insights. AWS S3, Azure Blob Storage, and Google Cloud Storage aren't rated as a single comparable category on Gartner Peer Insights, so a direct score isn't available.
Bring your cloud bill. We'll show you what it costs to bring the data home.
Schedule a complimentary architecture review. A TrueNAS engineer maps your actual access patterns against your current egress and retrieval charges, and models what the same data costs on TrueNAS Enterprise — no obligation, no forms.
Schedule Architecture ReviewSpeak directly with an engineer — not a sales rep.