I haven't tried this and don't know if it would work -- but depending on the shape of your data and queries, you might not need certain indices. That is, for some workloads (especially if you're thinking of spot instances), it might be overall faster to skip the indexing and allow the query to do a full table scan. It sounds like maybe you never tried the query without the index, so I'm curious to know if there's any weight behind this theory.