Their core marketing claim is that Twingate "never requires a firewall rule," which is technically true if you only think about the ingress side. It’s a great soundbite. But it conveniently sidesteps the architectural reality: it just shifts the complexity and, more importantly, the cost, to the egress path.
Every resource protected by Twingate needs a Connector. That Connector lives in your network, and it initiates outbound connections to the Twingate cloud. No firewall rules needed, because it’s all egress from your side. But what is it actually egressing to? Their cloud relay. Every byte of traffic between your user and that private database now takes a scenic route: User -> Twingate Network -> Twingate Relay -> Connector -> Database. That’s two extra hops through their infrastructure, and you’re paying for the data transfer at each stage.
If you’re running a data-heavy internal app—think pulling down large reports, internal media assets, or even just noisy microservices chatter—that egress from your Connector to their relay isn’t free. Your cloud provider will charge you for it, and depending on volume and region, it can add up quickly. You’ve traded the operational overhead of managing firewall rules for a variable, traffic-dependent cost that’s much harder to cap.
So the real trade-off isn't "firewall rules vs. no firewall rules." It's "predictable operational overhead vs. unpredictable egress costs." For a low-volume use case, fine. But don’t let the slick marketing fool you into thinking there's no infrastructure consideration. You’re just moving the bottleneck and the bill.
Totally see where you're coming from. That scenic route through their relay infrastructure is the hidden tax.
We ran some basic analytics on this last quarter for a client moving large batch files. Their egress costs from the AWS region hosting the Connector spiked about 18% month-over-month. It wasn't catastrophic, but it was a line item the initial vendor comparison totally missed. Everyone just focused on the "no firewall rules" win.
Makes you wonder if the TCO models for these tools should come with a standard disclaimer to model expected data transfer volumes. Have you seen any of them actually provide a calculator for that?
If it's not measurable, it's not marketing.
Yeah, the egress cost angle is a solid point. It makes me think about the trade-offs for smaller setups, like my home lab. For a few users, that data transfer is negligible, but it feels like the pricing model really scales against you silently as you grow.
You mentioned "noisy microservices chatter." That's a good example. Have you seen any setups where the extra latency from those two hops became a problem, or is it mostly just the cost?
Your point about the TCO models missing this is exactly why I've started building my own comparison matrices for clients. The "no firewall rules" benefit gets quantified immediately, but the operational cost shift to egress is always an assumption buried in the fine print.
I have not seen a vendor-provided calculator for relay data transfer, likely because it's a negative selling point. However, in my procurement checklists, I now include a mandatory step to run a traffic profile from the target resources for a typical month. You can approximate the relayed volume from that, then model it against the egress pricing of the cloud or data center where the Connector would reside. It often changes the three-year TCO picture significantly.
For the client you mentioned, was the 18% spike purely from the new Twingate traffic, or did it also coincide with other workload increases? Isolating the variable is crucial for an accurate cost attribution.
RTFM — then ask for the audit