The main question to me is: how the hell could two Open Search domains cost +$1k a month in the first place!?
AWS prices are ridiculous. I pay OVH $18/mo for a 4-core, 32 GB RAM, 1 TB SSD dedicated server. The cheapest on AWS would be r6g.xlarge, which costs $145/mo. Almost 10x.
Yes, AWS hardware is usually better, but they give me 4 "vCPUs". OVH gives me 4 "real" CPU cores. There's a LOT of difference. E even if my processor is worse than AWS', I still prefer 4 real CPUs than virtual ones, which are overbooked by AWS and rarely give me 100% of their power.
OVH gives me 300 Mbit, while r6g.xlarge gives "up to" 10 Gbit. But still, 10x? 300 Mbit gives me ~37 mb/s. I use a CDN for large stuff: HTML, images, JS, anyways...
There are certainly cases where AWS is the go-to option, but I think it's a small minority where it actually makes sense.