A photo backup app paying twice for the same byte

A photo backup app paying twice for the same byte

A consumer photo service stored originals in a cloud bucket and served them through a CDN. Every cache miss pulled the full-res file from the bucket, and the cloud provider charged egress on each pull. With a cold long tail of old albums, the monthly cloud egress bill hit $4,200 — separate from the CDN bill.

They were paying egress and delivery for identical bytes.

What we changed: moved storage to a provider inside the CDN's zero-egress partnership, so cache misses pulling from origin no longer incurred egress fees. We also raised the edge TTL on immutable originals to 30 days, shrinking miss frequency on the warm set.

Monthly origin egress charges dropped from $4,200 to $0. The longer TTL cut miss rate from 21% to 6%, so even the storage-side read operations fell by two-thirds. Delivery latency in Berlin held steady at 30ms.

The number that mattered: $4,200/month egress to zero.