Getting Started

When you are using AWS, there are times when you have to worry about the price.
Whether it's the initial design, when you first start using it, when you get a bill, when you suddenly realize it, or when you get a price alert.
The common belief in the world and the conversations I've had with engineers is that the Northern Virginia region is the lowest cost region, so if you don't have any restrictions, you should choose the three regions including the Northern Virginia region (Oregon and Ohio).

However, I wondered if this was true, so I tested the theory that AWS' Northern Virginia region (us-east-1) is not necessarily the least expensive.

Conclusion

There were a few services that did not have the lowest rates in the Northern Virginia region (us-east-1) of AWS.
However, even in those cases, the difference between the region with the lowest price and the region with the lowest price was very small, and only in some price categories did another region have the lowest price. In conclusion, the Northern Virginia region is almost certainly the least expensive. (Conclusion based on the services we tested)

How to verify

I have the impression that the AWS tariffs are not very specific about comparing regions.
However, as expected of AWS, they do provide APIs.
We used the AWS Price List API here to compare the prices in each region for the same price category.

The following services were surveyed.

• AlexaTopSites
• ApiGateway
• Athena
• Budgets
• Chime
• CloudMap
• CloudTrail
• CodeArtifact
• CodeBuild
• CodePipeline
• Cognito
• comprehendmedical
• Connect
• DeepRacer
• DevOpsGuru
• ElementalMediaTailor
• FSx
• Honeycode
• Inspector
• Kinesis
• KinesisAnalytics
• KinesisFirehose
• KinesisVideo
• Lambda
• Lex
• Lightsail
• Macie
• Neptune
• NetworkFirewall
• NimbleStudio
• Pinpoint
• RoboMaker
• Shield
• StepFunctions
• StorageGateway
• Sumerian
• SupportBusiness
• SupportEnterprise
• VPC
• WAM
• WorkSpaces
• DAX
• ECR
• ECS
• EFS
• EKS
• Amazon EventBridge
• SES
• CloudFront
• CloudFormation
• CloudSearch
• CloudWatch
• DynamoDB
• ElastiCache
• ELB
• MQ
• Glacier
• S3
• SQS
• XRay

Result

We have confirmed that there is a pattern in which North Virginia is not the cheapest for the following services. (As of Oct 5, 2021)

• CodeBuild
• FSx
• Neptune
• NimbleStudio
• StepFunctions
• VPC
• WorkSpaces
• CloudWatch
• DynamoDB
• ElastiCache
• ELB
• S3

For example, in the case of ELB, the NLB NLCU hourly rate was 0.0057 USD for Europe (Stockholm) and 0.006 USD for the Eastern US (Northern Virginia). (Stockholm is putting up a good fight.

At the end

We have started Diff AWS Pricing, a service that provides a list of information like the above.
I hope it will help you choose a region other than the one you are currently using. (I believe that the decision to choose a region will not be based on price alone, but on various aspects such as latency and privacy policy.)

As for AWS pricing, the official AWS price list is correct, as described in the official documentation, so please refer to it in the end.

The Price List Service API provides pricing details for your information only. If there is a discrepancy between the offer file and a service pricing page, If there is a discrepancy between the offer file and a service pricing page, AWS charges the prices that are listed on the service pricing page. For more information about AWS service pricing, see Cloud Services Pricing.