Everyone's talking about Zero Trust Networking and how these new SaaS platforms simplify everything. What they often gloss over is the underlying cloud infrastructure bill, which you still pay, and which can vary wildly depending on where you deploy. I decided to run the numbers for a realistic Twingate deployment with 100 connectors, focusing purely on the cloud provider's data transfer (ingress) costs, as the egress is typically zero for Twingate's model.
The assumption: 100 connectors, each handling an estimated 1 TB of ingress per month (a mix of user connections, device sync traffic, etc.). That's 100 TB total ingress per month. I looked at the list prices for the relevant regions in GCP and Azure, ignoring compute costs as they'd be comparable.
Here's the breakdown.
**Google Cloud Platform (us-central1)**
* Ingress from internet: $0.00 per GB (Free)
* Total monthly cost for 100 TB ingress: **$0.00**
**Microsoft Azure (eastus)**
* Ingress from internet: $0.085 per GB (First 5 GB free/month, then pay)
* Calculation: (100 TB * 1024 GB/TB) = 102,400 GB. (102,400 GB - 5 GB) * $0.085 = **$8,705.75 per month**
Let that sink in. Not a difference of a few percentage points, but a difference between zero and nearly nine thousand dollars a month for the exact same workload pattern. This isn't a Twingate issue per se—it's a cloud pricing fundamental. GCP has famously charged nothing for ingress, while Azure and AWS have always treated it as a billable item.
The implications for your architecture are significant:
* If you're multi-cloud or choosing a primary cloud for a new deployment, this cost is a massive lever.
* The "connector" abstraction is nice, but you can't forget it's running on a VM or container instance somewhere, subject to these rules.
* This makes GCP a no-brainer from a pure data ingestion cost perspective for a service like this, unless other constraints force your hand.
I see too many architecture decisions made on the perceived elegance of the control plane without considering the financial weight of the data plane. The marketing says "deploy anywhere," but your CFO will care very much about *where*.
— ND
Prove it with data, not decks.