Billing, budget, and cost management

Estimate before you build, alert and analyze after, and organize costs by account and tag.

Cost tools

• AWS Pricing Calculator: Estimate the cost of a planned architecture.
• AWS Budgets: Alerts (email or SNS) when actual or forecasted cost, usage, or RI/Savings Plans coverage crosses a threshold.
• AWS Cost Explorer: Visualize and filter past costs by service, account, or tag, and forecast future spend.
• AWS Cost and Usage Report (CUR): The most detailed line-item billing data, delivered to S3 for analysis (CUR 2.0 is set up through AWS Data Exports).
• Billing and pricing information: The Billing and Cost Management console holds bills and invoices, every service has a pricing page, and AWS Support answers account and billing questions for all customers.

AWS Organizations and consolidated billing

• Organizations groups accounts under a management account and organizational units, and can limit member accounts with service control policies (SCPs).
• Consolidated billing gives one bill, combines usage to reach volume pricing tiers sooner, shares RI and Savings Plans discounts, and still shows each account's charges for cost allocation.

Cost allocation tags

• Tags are AWS-generated (for example, aws:createdBy) or user-defined (for example, Project=Website).
• Activate them as cost allocation tags in the Billing console before they appear in Cost Explorer and the Cost and Usage Report.