Tips for Lowering CloudFront Costs Despite a Good Cache Hit Ratio

Have you talked to your account manager about your costs? If you're not under any private pricing agreement, that might be a good route. Sometimes you can get steep discounts for larger object sizes. If you're already in a discount program, pushing hard on this could still help!

Reducing bandwidth use can make a big difference. Try compressing your images and videos more, and use lazy loading for your website or app. Diverting traffic to a cheaper CDN could work too, but keep in mind this might add some latency.

CloudFront is one of those services where you can actually negotiate pricing, especially if your spend is uber high—above $100k a year. If you're serious about switching, try getting quotes from services like Fastly or Cloudflare, and load balance your traffic. You could say you're willing to adjust the load to 80/20 in favor of CloudFront if they can drop the price to something reasonable. You might need to commit to a longer contract though, like one to three years!

We swapped some traffic to a different CDN and saved a chunk of money. It was simple to set up, and so far no issues. I was hesitant about potential downstream effects but everything's run smoothly. Definitely worth exploring alternatives!

Since your cache hit ratio is solid, if you can't get a good deal with CloudFront, looking at other CDNs might be your next best bet—options like Cloudflare or Bunny could save you a considerable sum. If you aren't already, consider talking to someone like The Duckbill Group to help negotiate better prices with AWS.