* if our upstream is saturated we're going to look at our biggest users and if the number is really big we'll send them a polite email to please reduce it or pay more.
There are reports of people getting emails from Hetzner after sending multiple Gbps continuously for several months. That's the level you have to reach before the * kicks in. Only 1Gbps servers are unmetered, so you'd have to have several.
If you want to know a better approximation of their true cost just look at their non-unlimited plans: 20TB/month included for free; 1€/TB (excl VAT) after that.
I have one more interesting data point to add: I was quoted 950€/month for a dedicated 10Gbps between Berlin and Amsterdam (about 600km) plus peering at AMS-IX, or 300€ for 1Gbps. (They're not secretive and you can just ask for a quote using their sales contact form). Extrapolating, it seems that 1€ is worth about 2.5 petabyte-kilometers, at least within the dense interconnections of continental Europe. About twice the price of shipping a petabyte of hard drives the same distance.
> If you want to know a better approximation of their true cost just look at their non-unlimited plans: 20TB/month included for free; 1€/TB (excl VAT) after that.
I will point out that this is still about 50x-80x cheaper than Amazon. Not far off the claim of 100x.
Cloudflare and most other Object Storage Providers either fully free egress for all users or at-least for inter-cloud transit so you can then put a free/cheap CDN like Cloudflare in front and not pay all that much for b/w.
AWS refuses to participate. Costs of retrieval of all data plus associated bandwidth is a so high for many people that they stick to S3 including me.
* up to 2TB per month