Cost Management

AWS gives you tools to understand, break down and forecast your spending so there are no surprises.

Because AWS bills for usage, keeping an eye on cost is part of running well on the cloud. Several built-in tools help.

The tools

  • Billing Dashboard — your current month-to-date charges and Free-Tier usage.
  • AWS Cost Explorer — visualize and filter spend by service, tag, or account over time, and forecast the coming months.
  • Cost and Usage Report (CUR) — the most detailed line-item data, delivered to S3.
  • Cost Allocation Tags — group cost by Project or Team.

Ways to save

  • Right-size over-provisioned instances.
  • Use Savings Plans or Reserved Instances for steady workloads (up to ~72% off).
  • Use Spot Instances for fault-tolerant batch work (up to ~90% off).
  • Delete idle resources — unattached EIPs, old snapshots, stopped-but-kept volumes.

Example

Example · bash
# See this month's cost broken down by service
aws ce get-cost-and-usage \
  --time-period Start=2026-07-01,End=2026-07-31 \
  --granularity MONTHLY --metrics "UnblendedCost" \
  --group-by Type=DIMENSION,Key=SERVICE

When to use it

  • A CFO uses AWS Cost Explorer to compare month-over-month spending and identifies an unexpected 40% spike caused by unattached EBS volumes.
  • A platform team uses AWS Cost and Usage Reports (CUR) to feed billing data into a BI tool for per-product cost allocation to internal teams.
  • A startup uses AWS Compute Optimizer recommendations to right-size over-provisioned EC2 instances and cut their compute bill by 25%.

More examples

Get Monthly Cost Summary

Retrieves a 3-month blended cost summary, giving a quick view of spending trends over time.

Example · bash
aws ce get-cost-and-usage \
  --time-period Start=2024-01-01,End=2024-04-01 \
  --granularity MONTHLY \
  --metrics BlendedCost \
  --query 'ResultsByTime[].{Month:TimePeriod.Start,Cost:Total.BlendedCost.Amount}' \
  --output table

Break Down Costs by Service

Groups last month's costs by AWS service so you can identify which services are driving the most spending.

Example · bash
aws ce get-cost-and-usage \
  --time-period Start=2024-03-01,End=2024-04-01 \
  --granularity MONTHLY \
  --metrics BlendedCost \
  --group-by Type=DIMENSION,Key=SERVICE \
  --query 'ResultsByTime[].Groups[].{Service:Keys[0],Cost:Metrics.BlendedCost.Amount}' \
  --output table

Get Rightsizing Recommendations

Fetches EC2 rightsizing recommendations from Cost Explorer, showing potential monthly savings from instance downsizing.

Example · bash
aws ce get-rightsizing-recommendation \
  --service EC2 \
  --query 'RightsizingRecommendations[].{Current:CurrentInstance.InstanceType,Recommended:RightsizingType,Savings:EstimatedMonthlySavings}' \
  --output table

Related

aws budgetsaws tags

Discussion

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