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- AWS Pricing Calculator vs Cost Explorer
AWS Pricing Calculator vs Cost Explorer
Cloud cost management remains the toughest operational challenge in 2025, according to 84% of tech leaders — above security, governance, lack of resources, and other challenges. As organizations scale to encompass multicloud, SaaS and AI, so does the difficulty of understanding where money goes and how to control it.
Analysts estimate that roughly one in every three dollars spent on cloud infrastructure will be wasted in 2025.
For AWS users, that’s where AWS Cost Explorer and AWS Pricing Calculator come in. Cost Explorer gives you visibility into what you’re spending and why, while the Pricing Calculator lets you model future deployments to avoid surprises before they hit your bill.
In this post, we’ll break down how these two tools differ, when to use each, and how to combine them.
Or if you’re in a hurry, check out the quick comparison table below.
Feature | AWS Cost Explorer | AWS Pricing Calculator |
Purpose | Analyze, visualize, and manage existing AWS costs and usage. | Estimate and model future AWS costs before deployment. |
Primary Use Case | Understanding spending trends, cost drivers, and usage patterns. | Forecasting and planning budgets for new or modified AWS architectures. |
Key Capabilities | Historical cost analysis, forecasting, tagging and filtering, cost allocation reports. | Detailed cost modeling by service, configurable usage inputs, architectural comparisons. |
Data Source | Based on actual AWS billing and usage data from your account. | Based on user-defined configurations and assumptions. |
Interface | Graphical dashboards with charts, filters, and cost breakdowns. | Form-based interface with inputs for services, configurations, and usage. |
Output | Interactive reports, forecasts, and visualizations of real costs. | Detailed estimates with itemized pricing and regional breakdowns. |
Complexity | Moderate – requires tagging and account configuration for granular insights. | Low – simple interface for quick cost estimation. |
Ideal Users | Finance, FinOps, and DevOps teams managing existing AWS environments. | Solution architects, planners, and procurement teams designing new workloads. |
What Is the AWS Pricing Calculator?
AWS Pricing Calculator is a web-based tool that helps you estimate the cost of AWS services before deployment. It allows you to model architectures, configure individual resources, and compare pricing options across instance types, regions, and usage patterns.
You can select specific AWS services—such as EC2, S3, RDS, or Lambda—and customize parameters like instance size, storage type, data transfer, and usage duration. The calculator then produces an itemized estimate showing monthly and annual costs, helping teams understand the financial impact of design decisions before launching workloads.
What does the AWS Pricing Calculator do?
The AWS Pricing Calculator helps teams forecast and plan AWS costs with detailed, configurable estimates. You can:
Build full-stack estimates — Combine services like EC2, EKS, RDS, and S3 into a single architectural model.
Compare pricing options — Evaluate On-Demand, Savings Plans, and Reserved Instance rates side by side.
Adjust key inputs — Modify instance type, region, storage class, or data transfer to instantly see cost impact.
Forecast spend — Generate monthly and annual cost projections for new workloads or migrations.
Export estimates — Download results as a CSV or PDF, or share a public link directly with other stakeholders.
AWS Pricing Calculator Pros
Provides accurate pre-deployment estimates to help plan AWS costs before launching resources and avoid billing surprises.
Offers granular configuration options, allowing you to customize instance family, region, storage type, and data transfer levels.
Supports complex architectures by combining multiple services in one estimate to model entire production environments.
Compares pricing models easily, showing the cost differences between On-Demand, Savings Plans, and Reserved Instances in real time.
Helps validate design decisions by quantifying the financial impact of scaling, redundancy, or performance trade-offs.
Simplifies budget approvals by allowing you to export estimates as CSV or PDF files, or share them via public links.
Is completely free to use for creating, saving, and sharing estimates through the AWS Management Console.
Yet, AWS Pricing Calculator has some limitations to keep in mind before relying on its results for final budget decisions.
AWS Pricing Calculator Cons
Provides only estimates, not real-time pricing data — actual AWS bills may vary
Does not factor in existing usage, free tier eligibility, or volume discounts, assuming all resources start fresh.
Uses a fixed 730-hour month for compute pricing, which can slightly differ from AWS’s per-second billing.
Requires users to manually input configurations and assumptions, leaving room for human error or inconsistent estimates.
Limited in modeling multi-account or consolidated billing structures used by large organizations.
Excludes taxes, support plan fees, and third-party licensing costs, leading to potential gaps between estimates and actual invoices.
Can be time-consuming for complex architectures, since each AWS service must be added and configured individually
AWS Pricing Calculator Pricing
The AWS Pricing Calculator is completely free to use. There are no charges for creating, saving, or sharing cost estimates. You can access it directly from the AWS Pricing Calculator website without an AWS account, or log in to save estimates under your account for later reference.
AWS Pricing Calculator best practices: How to effectively use the AWS Pricing Calculator
To get the most accurate and actionable estimates, follow these best practices when using the AWS Pricing Calculator.
1. Clarify Your Requirements
Before building your estimate, define what you’re pricing—whether it’s a production workload, proof of concept, or migration scenario. Knowing your target performance, availability, and compliance needs helps you choose the right services, regions, and configurations instead of guessing.
2. Pick the Right AWS Region
Pricing varies between AWS Regions, sometimes by double-digit percentages. Select the region closest to your users or data sources, but balance latency, compliance, and cost. For global workloads, create separate estimates per region to identify potential savings or performance trade-offs.
3. Estimate Usage Accurately
Base your inputs on expected consumption, not just instance type or storage size. Estimate average and peak usage hours, data transfer volumes, and IOPS where applicable. Overestimating leads to inflated budgets; underestimating leads to unexpected bills.
4. Consider the AWS Free Tier
If you’re new to AWS or testing small workloads, include Free Tier eligibility in your assumptions. Services like EC2, S3, and Lambda offer limited usage at no charge for 12 months. Adjust your estimate accordingly so you don’t overstate early-stage costs.
5. Use Detailed Input
Leverage the calculator’s advanced fields—like storage class, instance size, data transfer direction, and redundancy options—to refine your estimates. Generic inputs might get you close, but detailed configurations reveal real costs and highlight where optimization opportunities exist.
6. Compare Different AWS Pricing Models
Model the same workload using On-Demand, Savings Plans, and Reserved Instances. Each option trades flexibility for savings—testing multiple models helps identify the right balance between agility and long-term cost efficiency.
7. Also, Account for Backup and Recovery
Don’t forget disaster recovery, snapshots, and backup storage. These are often separate line items in AWS billing and can meaningfully change your monthly total. Include services like AWS Backup or S3 Glacier to reflect realistic infrastructure resilience costs.
8. Regularly Update Your Estimates
AWS pricing and your workloads both evolve. Review and refresh your calculator inputs quarterly or after any major architectural change. This ensures budgets stay aligned with actual usage patterns and current AWS rates.
9. Benchmark Against Actual Costs
After deployment, compare your calculator estimates to real billing data in AWS Cost Explorer. Use the variance to fine-tune assumptions, correct usage patterns, and improve future forecasts. This is the foundation of an effective FinOps feedback loop.
10. Consider Other Essential Costs
Include data transfer, support plans, and monitoring services such as CloudWatch or GuardDuty. These are frequently overlooked but can add significant overhead in production environments.
11. Evaluate Third-Party Software Costs
If your architecture depends on licensed software—like databases, analytics platforms, or security tools—add those costs separately. The AWS Pricing Calculator doesn’t include third-party license or marketplace pricing by default.
12. Seek Expert Advice
For complex architectures or enterprise environments, validate your estimates with AWS-certified architects or FinOps professionals. They can help identify service discounts, architectural optimizations, or hidden costs you might miss in the calculator.
AWS Pricing Calculator Example
Let’s say you want to estimate the monthly cost of a simple web application hosted on AWS.
You open the AWS Pricing Calculator and add:
Amazon EC2 — one t3.medium instance running 24/7 in the us-east-1 region.
Amazon EBS — 50 GB of General Purpose SSD (gp3) storage.
Amazon S3 — 100 GB of object storage for static assets.
Amazon CloudFront — 1 TB of data transfer for global content delivery.
After configuring instance type, storage size, and transfer volumes, the calculator shows:
Estimated monthly cost: about $65.70 USD (as of current pricing).
You can adjust parameters like instance type, Reserved Instance term, or region to see how the total changes. Once finalized, export the estimate as a PDF or shareable link to include in your project budget or approval process.
What is AWS Cost Explorer?
AWS Cost Explorer is a free tool that lets you track, visualize, and analyze your AWS spending over time. It pulls data directly from your billing and usage reports so you can see where your money goes, which services cost the most, and how usage changes across accounts, regions, or projects.
What Does AWS Cost Explorer Do?
AWS Cost Explorer helps you analyze, visualize, and manage your AWS spending using live billing and usage data.
Visualizes costs with interactive charts to track spend trends, spikes, and anomalies over time.
Breaks down costs by service, account, region, tag, or linked organization to pinpoint high-cost areas.
Tracks daily, monthly, or hourly usage patterns for performance and budget analysis.
Generates forecasts from historical trends to predict future spend with configurable time ranges.
Offers custom and prebuilt reports for budgeting, showback, or cost allocation.
Tracks Savings Plan and Reserved Instance utilization to surface underused commitments.
Provides a Cost Explorer API for automating cost analysis, exporting data, and integrating with FinOps or BI tools.
Enables data export to CSV or PDF for finance and stakeholder reporting.
AWS Cost Explorer Pros
Understand cost drivers — Identify which services, accounts, or environments contribute most to your AWS bill.
Track usage efficiency — Correlate spend with resource utilization to find underused or overprovisioned assets.
Improve budgeting accuracy — Use historical patterns and forecasts to align budgets with real-world usage.
Enhance cost allocation — Apply tags and cost categories to distribute expenses by team, project, or business unit.
Support financial reporting — Export structured cost data for accounting, chargeback, and audit processes.
Enable FinOps maturity — Build repeatable workflows for monitoring, accountability, and continuous cost improvement.
AWS Cost Explorer Cons
Limited historical range — Only retains up to 12–13 months of detailed data by default, which can restrict long-term trend analysis.
Lacks real-time granularity — Data refreshes once every 24 hours, making it unsuitable for live cost tracking.
Complex interface at scale — Navigating multiple accounts, tags, or custom cost categories can become slow or confusing.
No direct forecasting customization — Forecasts rely on basic linear models rather than workload-specific or seasonal adjustments.
Requires tagging discipline — Incomplete or inconsistent cost allocation tags can make reports inaccurate or misleading.
Limited visualization options — Chart customization is minimal, making it hard to tailor dashboards for executives or FinOps reviews.
Data delay for new accounts — Newly linked accounts may take several hours or days to appear with full cost visibility.
AWS Cost Explorer Pricing
AWS Cost Explorer is free to use for all AWS accounts, including up to 12 months of historical data and 12 months of forecasts. API usage costs $0.01 per request after the first 1,000 free requests each month.
How to Access and Use AWS Cost Explorer
Open the AWS Management Console — Go to Billing and Cost Management → Cost Explorer. If it’s your first time, enable the service; it may take a few hours to load your initial data.
Select a time range — Choose daily, monthly, or hourly views to analyze short-term spikes or long-term trends.
Group and filter your data — Break down costs by service, linked account, region, tag, or usage type to pinpoint key spend drivers.
Create or customize reports — Start with prebuilt reports like Monthly Costs by Service, or build your own to focus on teams, projects, or environments.
Use forecasting — View cost projections for the next 12 months based on your historical usage patterns.
Export your reports — Download data as CSV or PDF for collaboration with finance or leadership.
Apply consistent tagging — Use AWS cost allocation tags to make grouping and tracking more accurate.
Save custom views — Keep frequently used filters and reports for quick access later.
Set up budgets and alerts — Combine Cost Explorer with AWS Budgets to get notified when spend exceeds expected thresholds.
Automate insights — Use the Cost Explorer API to integrate spend data into BI tools, dashboards, or FinOps workflows.
AWS Cost Explorer vs AWS Pricing Calculator: What Are The Main Differences?
Let’s compare Amazon AWS Pricing Calculator and Cost Explorer:
Purpose
AWS Cost Explorer is designed to analyze, visualize, and manage your existing AWS spend and usage. AWS Pricing Calculator estimates future costs for planned AWS deployments.
Usage
Cost Explorer helps you track real spend, identify trends, and find optimization opportunities. Pricing Calculator lets you model architectures and forecast expected costs before launch.
Features
Cost Explorer provides historical spend data, filtering, forecasting, and RI/Savings Plan utilization tracking. Pricing Calculator builds hypothetical pricing models across services, configurations, and regions.
User Interface
Cost Explorer uses a chart-based dashboard for visual analysis of actual costs. Pricing Calculator uses a form-based interface where you input services and configuration details.
Data Analysis
Cost Explorer uses actual AWS billing and usage data for accurate trend analysis and optimization. Pricing Calculator relies on user-provided inputs and static pricing tables for cost projections.
Time Frame
Cost Explorer shows past and present data with limited forecasting (up to 12 months ahead). Pricing Calculator focuses entirely on future cost estimation based on configured scenarios.
Target User
Cost Explorer serves FinOps, finance, and operations teams managing live environments. Pricing Calculator is built for solution architects, planners, and sales engineers modeling new workloads.
Complexity
Cost Explorer can be complex at scale, requiring tagging and governance for accurate insights. Pricing Calculator is simpler but less flexible, focused on quick what-if pricing scenarios rather than analysis.
AWS Cost Explorer Vs. Pricing Calculator: What's Best For Your Business?
As we’ve discussed above, AWS Cost Explorer is best for getting visibility into your cloud costs on an ongoing basis.
AWS Pricing Calculator, on the other hand, is ideal for planning and modeling costs before you deploy.
However, if you’re looking for more than just AWS’s native reporting and forecasting tools, nOps can take you further.
On the visualization side, nOps gets you real-time cost allocation, business metrics like cost per customer, forecasting, anomaly detection and more, with one-click integrations into multicloud, SaaS and all your AI costs.
And with nOps, you don’t just see costs — you act on them. The platform continuously analyzes your AWS environment, automatically identifies inefficiencies, and takes corrective actions like rightsizing, scaling, and optimizing commitments.
nOps was recently ranked #1 with five stars in G2’s cloud cost management category, and we optimize $2+ billion in cloud spend for our customers — book a demo with one of our AWS experts to try it out for yourself.
Frequently Asked Questions: Difference between AWS Pricing Calculator vs Cost Explorer
Let’s dive into some FAQ about AWS Cost Explorer vs Pricing Calculator.
What is the benefit of AWS Pricing Calculator?
AWS Pricing Calculator helps you estimate the cost of AWS services before deployment. It lets you model infrastructure configurations, adjust usage parameters, and compare pricing across instance types or regions.
What is the difference between AWS Budgets and Cost Explorer?
AWS Budgets lets you set custom spending or usage thresholds and sends alerts when you exceed them, while Cost Explorer provides visualization and analysis of historical costs and usage trends. Budgets is proactive and goal-based; Cost Explorer is analytical and retrospective, helping teams monitor and investigate cost drivers.
How much does AWS Cost Explorer cost?
AWS Cost Explorer is free for basic usage with 12 months of historical data. API access and hourly granularity beyond standard reports incur additional charges of $0.01 per API request.
What is the main difference between the AWS TCO Calculator and the AWS Pricing Calculator?
The AWS TCO Calculator estimates long-term savings when migrating from on-prem infrastructure to AWS by modeling hardware, labor, and energy costs. The AWS Pricing Calculator estimates ongoing operational costs for AWS resources. TCO focuses on total economic comparison; Pricing Calculator focuses on service-level cost forecasting and architecture design.
What are the benefits of AWS Cost Explorer?
AWS Cost Explorer helps you visualize and analyze spending patterns, filter costs by service, region, or account, and identify trends or anomalies. It enables cost allocation, tagging analysis, and forecast modeling, giving finance and engineering teams visibility.
