Atlas tabulates data transfer costs daily. Pricing varies by cloud provider and by the region of the source and destination nodes. This page describes sources of data transfer costs, pricing by provider, and strategies to reduce costs.
Select your cloud provider to view the applicable data transfer costs.
Sources of Data Transfer Costs
Atlas charges for data transfer between your Atlas node and another node. The following transfers incur costs, listed in order of lowest cost to highest:
Clusters
Multi-region clusters might have higher data transfer costs depending on the number and location of additional regions, as well as the number of clusters deployed to each region.
Push-based Log Exports
Exporting push-based logs incurs costs for data transfer.
Additional Data Transfer Usage
While application traffic drives the majority of your costs, essential platform operations contribute small amounts of additional data transfer to your aggregate billing. These background processes ensure the health, security, and performance of your deployment.
The underlying cloud provider bills this traffic as part of the total network usage required to maintain your managed service.
Live Migrate Your Data to Atlas
MongoDB hosts and operates the free Atlas Live Migration Service to help you migrate existing MongoDB databases to MongoDB Atlas. MongoDB doesn't charge for any incoming data transfers to an Atlas cluster. Learn more about migrating to Atlas.
How to Reduce Data Transfer Costs
The vast majority of Atlas customers spend less than 10% of their budget on data transfer. If you are spending significantly more, some of these optimizations may reduce your data transfer costs:
Check all applications and processes that access your data for inefficiencies. Ensure that queries do not:
Re-read data that already exists on the client.
Re-write existing data to your cluster.
Ensure that queries originate from the same cloud region and provider as your cluster whenever possible.
When cross-region queries are necessary:
Ensure read queries use the preference "nearest."
Source write queries from your Highest Priority Region whenever possible. For more information on region priorities, see Electable Nodes for High Availability.
Perform query operations with projection to specify or restrict the fields that MongoDB returns in matching documents, thereby limiting the amount of data that MongoDB sends to applications. Alternatively, project document fields using the
$projectaggregation stage from the Aggregation Framework to reduce the size of a document before you transfer it.Enable network compression in your client driver to compress data between the client and the server. As an example, you can configure the network compression option for your Node.js driver. Atlas always compresses intra-cluster communication. To learn more, see the Driver's Documentation.
Note
Queries from on-premises environments into Atlas, across cloud providers, or between continents on the same cloud provider incur the greatest data transfer costs.