Understand Resources For Billing, Budget, and Cost Management
Source: Dev.to
Core Billing and Pricing Information Sources
Billing support and billing info
Billing and payments are handled through AWS’s billing tools in the console. AWS provides billing visibility and support options through its billing experience and support plans.
Typical uses
- View invoices and charges
- Manage payment methods
- Get help with billing issues
Pricing information for AWS services
AWS pricing information is available publicly on service pricing pages and via estimation tools such as the AWS Pricing Calculator.
“Estimate monthly cost before deploying” → Pricing Calculator
Cost Management Tools
AWS Cost Explorer
A tool to visualize and analyze your historical AWS spending.
When to use
- See trends over time (day/month)
- Break down costs by service, account, or tag
- Identify what’s driving spend increases
“Analyze past spend, cost trends, break down by service” → Cost Explorer
AWS Budgets
A tool to plan and monitor spend/usage and send alerts.
When to use
- Receive alerts when cost or usage exceeds (or is forecasted to exceed) a threshold
- Enforce budget awareness for teams/projects
“Notify when costs exceed $X, budget alerts” → AWS Budgets
AWS Billing Conductor
A tool to create custom billing views and chargeback/showback, often for organizations that need tailored bills for internal teams or customers.
When to use
- Group, re‑label, or re‑rate costs for internal cost allocation
- Create customized billing views across complex org structures
“Customized billing for business units/tenants, chargeback/showback” → Billing Conductor
AWS Pricing Calculator
Used to estimate the cost of AWS services before you build.
When to use
- Planning a new workload and need a cost estimate
- Comparing architecture options and their expected monthly cost
“Estimate cost ahead of time” → Pricing Calculator
AWS Organizations
Consolidated Billing and Cost Allocation
AWS Organizations can combine multiple AWS accounts under one organization.
Consolidated billing
- Receive one bill for multiple accounts
- Charges are tracked per member account but billed centrally
- Simplifies cost management and allocation across accounts
“Multiple accounts, one bill” → Consolidated billing with AWS Organizations
Allocation of costs
Even with a single consolidated bill, you can:
- See costs per account
- Allocate costs using tagging strategies
Cost Allocation Tags and Billing Reports
Cost allocation tags let you label resources to track cost by:
- Department/team
- Project
- Application
- Environment (dev/test/prod)
- Cost center
Types of cost allocation tags
- AWS‑generated tags – created automatically by AWS for certain resources
- User‑defined tags – created by you; most common for internal reporting
How tags relate to billing reports
When activated, tags appear in:
- Cost Explorer breakdowns
- Billing reports, including the AWS Cost and Usage Report (CUR)
AWS Cost and Usage Report (CUR)
The Cost and Usage Report is AWS’s most detailed billing dataset.
When to use
- Need highly detailed line‑item usage and cost data
- Want deep analysis, reporting, or integration with analytics tools
“Most detailed billing report, line‑item costs and usage” → Cost and Usage Report (CUR)
Quick Exam‑Style Summary
- Pricing Calculator – estimate future cost before deploying
- Cost Explorer – analyze historical spend and trends
- Budgets – set budgets and get alerts/forecasts
- Billing Conductor – custom billing views and chargeback/showback
- AWS Organizations – consolidated billing across accounts
- Cost allocation tags – attribute spend by team/project/app
- Cost and Usage Report (CUR) – most detailed cost/usage data for reporting and analytics