We've been evaluating Twingate for a few months now, moving away from a traditional VPN for developer access. The core product is solid, but we just got hit with a significant and unexpected AWS bill.
Our setup uses Twingate's Connectors in AWS, deployed in a few regions for redundancy and performance. The documentation is clear about the compute costs for the EC2 instances, which we budgeted for. However, I realized our egress charges from those VPCs to the internet (through Twingate for user traffic) skyrocketed this past month.
It seems that all user traffic egressing to the internet flows out through the Connector's VPC, and AWS charges standard data transfer rates for that. With a team of developers constantly pulling dependencies, accessing external tools, and general browsing, the volume added up fast.
* Did anyone else encounter this?
* Is there a recommended architecture to mitigate these egress costs—like using a less expensive egress region or a specific VPC endpoint configuration we missed?
* For those who ran a cost comparison, how did the total cost of ownership (including this egress) compare to a solution like Cloudflare Tunnel or even a managed ZTNA service?
I like the granular access controls, but this operational cost blind spot is a serious consideration for us.
Benchmarks or bust
Oh yeah, this is a classic gotcha with any cloud-based egress model. It happened to us too when we first scaled up our deployment.
For us, the fix was moving the connectors to a single, cheaper egress region (us-east-1 in our case) and using Twingate's routing policies to steer all general internet traffic through there. We kept other connectors in their resource regions just for private network access. It cut the bill by over 60%.
Compared to Cloudflare Tunnel, the compute cost might be higher, but you gain more control. The managed ZTNA services bake that egress cost into the seat license, which can be simpler but sometimes more expensive at scale. Really depends on your traffic patterns.
Let the machines do the grunt work
Yeah, this is the exact trade-off you're making for that architectural control. We got burned the same way during a heavy npm install week.
You can set up a dedicated "egress VPC" with its connector in a cheaper region (like us-east-1), and use Split Tunneling in the Twingate client to only send private resource traffic through your regional connectors. All general web traffic goes out via the cheap egress point. It's a few extra steps in the Admin console, but it works.
For a pure cost comparison, Cloudflare Tunnel's lack of egress charges can look better, but you lose the granular network policies. We stuck with Twingate for that, but we now monitor egress in Cost Explorer like a hawk.
editor is my home
That split tunneling trick is smart, I hadn't thought of that. So the general web traffic from the client just bypasses Twingate completely if it's not a private resource?
I'm trying to understand the trade-off you mentioned. If you use that cheap-region egress VPC for the web, doesn't that mean all your developers' web traffic now appears to come from a single AWS region? Could that cause issues with geo-restricted services or latency for teams in other locations?
Still learning.
That 60% reduction is promising. How did you calculate the savings? Did you just compare the old total egress cost across all regions to the new, single-region cost, or did you factor in any new cross-region transfer between your private resource connectors and the egress one?
Oof, yeah, that first surprise egress bill is a real rite of passage. We got stung the same way during a major Docker image pull.
To your question on architecture, the single cheap egress region and split tunneling combo others mentioned is definitely the way. One nuance though - it works best if your private resources are all in one or two clouds. If you're accessing private things spread across many regions, the data transfer between your "resource" connectors and that central "egress" connector can add up and offset some savings. You'll need to check your traffic mix.
We did a rough TCO sheet against Cloudflare Tunnel. For us, Twingate was still cheaper overall because our team size is small, and we really value the per-resource policies. The egress just became a line item we actively manage. For a huge team with heavy web traffic, the math might flip. Have you looked at your Cost Explorer breakdown by region yet?
Let the machines do the grunt work
Your TCO math sounds optimistic.
That cross-region transfer cost you mentioned between private connectors and the egress one? It's not minor. If you're using AWS PrivateLink between VPCs for that traffic, you're paying the data processed rate on top of the outbound egress. It sneaks into the "AWS PrivateLink" line item, not the region egress, which makes people miss it.
For a team accessing private resources in us-west-2 and eu-central-1 with an egress in us-east-1, you're now paying egress twice for the same internet-bound packet. Once from the resource region to us-east-1, again from us-east-1 to the internet.
For our setup, split tunneling plus a cheap egress region only gave us a 30% reduction, not 60%. The rest was eaten by that internal AWS transfer.
show the math