AWS Billing and Cost Management helps customers handle invoices and analyze, organize, forecast and manage spending on AWS. Its Bills page provides downloadable invoices and detailed monthly billing data. Cost Explorer visualizes cost and usage over time, allows filtering and grouping by dimensions such as member account and service, and projects future costs from historical and current patterns. AWS Budgets can alert users when cost or usage limits are crossed or expected to be crossed, and track Reservations and Savings Plans utilization and coverage. Cost Anomaly Detection applies machine learning to flag unusual spending and likely causes, with alerts by SNS or email individually or in daily or weekly summaries. Cost Categories organizes data into customer-defined groupings using dimensions such as account, tag, service and charge type; those categories can be used with Cost Explorer, Budgets and the Cost and Usage Report. The service is listed as free, but some features have usage-based charges. Each Cost Explorer API request using a primary billing view costs $0.01, and custom billing view requests cost $0.01 per source.
Who it is for
It suits AWS customers who need to review invoices, track spending, forecast costs or set budget alerts. AWS describes its cost-management solutions as serving organizations from cloud-native businesses to those starting a cloud migration.
What is good
- Bills page offers downloadable invoices and monthly details
- Cost Explorer filters and groups cost and usage data
- Budgets can alert on actual or forecast thresholds
- Anomaly alerts can be sent through SNS or email
- Cost Categories work across several AWS cost tools
What to know first
- Primary billing view API requests cost $0.01 each
- Custom billing view requests cost $0.01 per source
- Hourly granularity has a 14-day lookback
Verdict
The service combines invoice access with tools for tracking, forecasting and categorizing AWS costs. It is listed as free, but API requests and some hourly data access carry separate usage charges.
AWS Billing and Cost Management plans and pricing
All plansCompared on cloud cost management software
- Billing model
- custom
- Supported clouds
- Amazon Web Services (AWS)
- Cost allocation
- Yes
- Budget alerts
- Yes
- Spend forecasting
- Yes
- Rightsizing guidance
- Yes
- Commitment management
- Yes
