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Wouldn't the cost of transferring the crawled data (compressed/archived) to AWS/EC2 partially offset the cost saving?

Edit: AWS still has free imbound BW.. my bad

No - inbound data transfer cost to AWS is free.

nice thing about running crawlers from EC2 - all inbound bandwidth is free

Like running crawlers what can be some other use cases where free inbound is a blessing?

Backup/archive, where uploading data is frequent and downloading it is only very occasionally required.