Explanation
Why the waste happens and who it affects.
CloudFront pay-as-you-go rates depend on the geography of the edge that serves the request, and data transfer and request prices outside the United States, Canada, Mexico and Europe are higher. A distribution whose audience is mostly in North America and Europe still pays those higher rates for every request that happens to be served from a more expensive edge.
Price classes let the owner exclude the more expensive edge locations. Viewers are not blocked: requests from excluded areas are served from the lowest-latency edge inside the chosen price class, and if an edge outside the class is occasionally used, CloudFront charges the rate of the least expensive location in the class. The tradeoff is higher latency for those viewers. The waste appears when distributions keep the default and are never reviewed, typically internal tools, regional products, B2B portals and download sites whose users are concentrated in a few markets.
Billing model
The pricing dimensions that drive this cost.
CloudFront pay-as-you-go charges are set by the billing region of the edge location that serves each request.
- Regional data transfer out
- Billed per GB in volume tiers, at different rates per edge geography, after the first 1 TB per month free
- Regional request charges
- Billed per 10,000 HTTP or HTTPS requests, at different rates per edge geography, after the first 10 million per month free
- Price Class All
- Serves from every edge location, including the highest-priced geographies
- Price Class 200
- Excludes South America and Australia and New Zealand edge locations
- Price Class 100
- Limits delivery to United States, Mexico, Canada, Europe, Israel and Turkiye edge locations
How to detect
4 checks to find it in your estate.
- List distributions and read the PriceClass field of each DistributionConfig (PriceClass_All, PriceClass_200 or PriceClass_100) to find those on the default
- Open CloudFront Usage Reports and filter by Billing Region to see how much data transfer and how many requests each distribution serves from South America, Australia, India and Asia-Pacific edges
- In Cost Explorer or the Cost and Usage Report, break CloudFront cost down by usage type region prefix to size the share of spend coming from higher-priced geographies
- Confirm with product or analytics owners where the distribution's users actually are and whether those viewers are latency sensitive
How to fix
4 ways to remove the waste.
- Change the distribution's price class to Price Class 100 or Price Class 200 in the console or with UpdateDistribution; viewers in excluded areas are still served from the nearest included edge. Price class applies to standard distributions only, not multi-tenant distributions
- Keep Price Class All for audiences that are genuinely global or latency sensitive in excluded regions, such as consumer apps or streaming with significant South American or Australian traffic
- Test latency for affected geographies before and after the change, for example with CloudFront real-time or standard logs, and roll back if performance targets are missed
- Review price class together with any CloudFront flat-rate plan, Security Savings Bundle or private pricing commitments, since those change the per-region economics
Documentation
Vendor references for pricing and configuration.