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AWS Services - Billing & Cost Management

The Billing & Cost Management Dashboard in AWS provides a centralized place to manage your account’s usage, payments, and costs.
It allows you to view invoices, set budgets, analyze costs, and monitor your Free Tier usage.
This section is accessible from the top right corner of the AWS Management Console under Billing and Cost Management.

Billing Dashboard

The dashboard gives an overview of:

  • Current month-to-date usage and charges
  • Free Tier usage alerts
  • Links to invoices and payment methods
  • Access to Cost Explorer and Budgets

Payment Methods & Billing Preferences

  • Add or update credit/debit cards or bank accounts
  • Manage billing preferences (e.g., receiving PDF invoices by email)
  • Set up consolidated billing if managing multiple AWS accounts under an AWS Organization

Cost Explorer

The Cost Explorer provides detailed insights into your spending.

You can:

  • View historical data for the last 12–24 months
  • Break down costs by service, region, linked account, or tags
  • Identify usage trends and forecast future costs
  • Filter by specific services (e.g., EC2, S3) to understand spending

Cost Allocation Tags

Cost allocation tags help you organize and track AWS costs by labeling resources.

  • AWS-generated tags: Automatically created by AWS (e.g., aws:createdBy).
  • User-defined tags: Custom tags you define (e.g., Project=WebApp, Environment=Prod).

Steps to use tags for billing:

  1. Go to Billing Console → Cost Allocation Tags.
  2. Activate the tags you want to use for reporting.
  3. Use these tags in Cost Explorer or Budgets to filter and group costs.

Best practice:
Define a consistent tagging strategy across your organization (e.g., Project, Environment, Owner) to make cost reports meaningful.

Budgets

With AWS Budgets, you can create customized alerts to monitor usage and costs:

  • Cost Budgets – alert when spending exceeds a threshold
  • Usage Budgets – monitor specific service usage (e.g., EC2 hours)
  • Reservation Budgets – track reserved instances utilization
  • Notifications can be sent via Amazon SNS or email

Free Tier Usage

The dashboard tracks your AWS Free Tier usage:

  • Monitors services with free limits (e.g., 750 hours of EC2 t2.micro, 5 GB of S3 storage)
  • Alerts you when usage approaches Free Tier limits to prevent unexpected charges

Reports & Invoices

  • Download monthly invoices in PDF format
  • Export detailed usage reports in CSV for analysis
  • Integrate billing data with AWS Cost and Usage Report (CUR) for advanced analysis in Amazon Athena or Redshift

Best Practices

  • Always enable Budgets to prevent overspending
  • Use Cost Explorer regularly to identify unused or underutilized resources
  • Set up Free Tier alerts if you’re testing AWS services
  • Consider Consolidated Billing for multiple accounts to optimize costs

Summary

The Billing & Cost Management Dashboard is a key tool for keeping control of your AWS spending.
By using features like Cost Explorer, Budgets, and Free Tier monitoring, you can optimize costs and prevent unexpected charges.