Price class and cache-hit ratio drive the cost

CloudFront cost optimization

CloudFront cost comes down to how much origin traffic you avoid and how far your content travels. Idle distributions, an over-broad price class, and a low cache-hit ratio quietly inflate the bill.

Why the waste happens

  • Distributions are created for a launch or a test and left running with near-zero traffic.
  • The price class is set to all edge locations when the audience is concentrated in one or two regions.
  • Weak caching headers give a low cache-hit ratio, so requests fall through to the origin and rack up origin transfer.
  • S3 origins are served without Origin Access Control or compression, adding avoidable origin fetches and bytes.

How to spot it

  • Distributions with minimal or zero requests over the last few weeks.
  • PriceClass_All on a distribution whose users are regional.
  • A low cache-hit ratio in the CloudFront metrics.
  • S3-origin distributions without compression or OAC configured.

The fix

  • Delete distributions that serve no meaningful traffic.
  • Set the price class to match where your audience actually is.
  • Raise the cache-hit ratio with sensible TTLs and cache headers so fewer requests reach the origin.
  • Enable compression and Origin Access Control for S3-backed distributions.

Find every CloudFront issue in one scan

Cloud Cost Analyzer flags idle CloudFront distributions and S3-origin distributions that could be optimized, and points at the price-class and caching settings worth revisiting, with cost context for each.

$ cca scan --provider aws

Read-only, runs in about 5 minutes. Free tier, no credit card.

CloudFront cost FAQ

How do I reduce CloudFront costs?+

Delete idle distributions, set the price class to match your audience geography, raise the cache-hit ratio with better TTLs and cache headers so fewer requests reach the origin, and enable compression. Higher cache-hit ratios directly reduce origin transfer charges.

What does the CloudFront price class do?+

The price class limits which edge locations serve your content. Using a narrower class (for example only North America and Europe) is cheaper and is the right choice when your users are concentrated there rather than worldwide.

Why does cache-hit ratio matter for cost?+

Every request that misses the cache is served from your origin, incurring origin data-transfer and request costs. Improving the cache-hit ratio with correct caching headers keeps more traffic at the edge and off your origin.

More cost guides

NAT Gateways

Idle gateways and avoidable data-processing charges, one per AZ.

RDS databases

Over-provisioned classes, non-Graviton, and Multi-AZ on non-prod.

EBS volumes

Orphaned volumes, old snapshots, and gp2 you never moved to gp3.

Load balancers

ALBs and NLBs with no targets or near-zero traffic, still billing.

S3 storage

Cold data sitting in Standard with no lifecycle policy.

EC2 instances

Idle and oversized instances, previous-gen types, 24/7 dev boxes.

Aurora

Oversized instances, Serverless v1, and I/O-Optimized breakevens.

ElastiCache

Idle cache clusters and oversized, non-Graviton nodes.

DynamoDB

On-demand billing on steady workloads, and unused indexes.

Lambda

Over-provisioned memory and x86 functions that could be arm64.

See what you are overpaying for

Point a read-only CLI at your account and get a ranked fix list with dollar amounts. Free tier, no credit card.