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AWS Billing and Cost Management is a set of tools and services to help ease cloud spend and billing activities. AWS has three main clusters under Billing and Cost Management. These include billing, cost management, and usage reports.
AWS Billing differs slightly from cost management. While billing focuses on automating payments, cost management aims to get you more cloud resources at the least cloud spend.
How Does AWS Billing Work?
The AWS Billing Console collects information from Cost and Usage Reports and presents it for the user to pay. It provides access to all previous payments, AWS credits, and consolidated bills.
Behind the scenes, AWS calculates charges based on hourly or request-based usage across services like EC2, S3, and Lambda. These charges are aggregated daily into your Cost and Usage Report (CUR), which feeds into the Billing Console. There, charges are grouped by service, region, and account. After applying discounts, credits, and consolidated billing logic, AWS generates a final monthly invoice you can pay directly from the console.
Main Features of AWS Billing Console
The AWS Billing Console gives you a central place to view charges, manage payments, and track usage. It helps you monitor costs across services, accounts, and regions with detailed breakdowns and reports. Features include:
Access to Redeemable Credits: AWS credits can help offset an existing cloud bill. If you’re a new AWS user, you can redeem the free $300 credit. Note that AWS credits only apply to eligible services and cannot be used to offset bills of the previous months before receiving the credit. The AWS Billing Console lists all available AWS credits. You can redeem credits, view the remaining balance, and even download a list of all available credits.
View and Pay Your Bill: The Billing Console takes you through a step-by-step method when paying your AWS bill. If you set up automatic payments, AWS will automatically deduct them from your payment system. But if there’s an error, the AWS Billing Console lets you make the payment manually. You can also use the Billing Console to set up bills to appear in your local currency.
Managing Your Payment Methods: Use the Billing Console to add a new payment method or remove old payment information. You can also configure your preferred payment methods using this console. By default, AWS presents your latest bill. To view outstanding bills of previous months, use the date filter in the Billing Console.
Perform Consolidated Bills: You can also combine bills from multiple accounts into one bill at no extra cost. Consolidated bills are ideal where one business unit pays all AWS costs.
How Does the AWS Cost Management Dashboard Work?
AWS Cost Management is one of the five pillars of the AWS Well-Architected Framework. By using AWS inbuilt tools, people can use previous data to forecast and optimize future spending.
The AWS Cost Management Dashboard pulls data from your Cost and Usage Reports (CUR) to visualize spend over time. It provides interactive graphs for tracking trends, filtering by service, account, region, or tag, and forecasting future costs. You can set budgets, define cost anomaly alerts, and export data for deeper analysis. It’s designed to help you quickly understand where your money is going and spot unusual spending patterns.
Benefits of AWS Billing and Cost Management
AWS Billing and Cost Management tools help you understand, track, and optimize your cloud spending. From visibility to savings, these features support both day-to-day operations and long-term financial planning.
Cost Visibility and Control
The Billing Console and Cost Management Dashboard give you detailed insight into your AWS usage and charges. You can monitor spending by service, region, or linked account, making it easier to identify and address unexpected cost spikes.
Cost Allocation and Tagging
Tagging lets you assign costs to specific teams, projects, or environments. This enables accurate chargeback and showback, helping you align cloud spend with business units or functions.
AWS Cost and Usage Reports
The CUR provides granular, hourly-level usage data across all AWS services. It powers billing dashboards, forecasts, and third-party tools—giving you the raw data needed for deep cost analysis.
Efficient Cost Savings
By combining CUR data, budgets, and anomaly detection, AWS helps you identify underutilized resources and optimize your spend. You can also track the impact of Reserved Instances, Savings Plans, and credits in one place.
Disadvantages to Consider for AWS Billing and Cost Management
While AWS offers powerful tools for tracking and managing costs, there are several challenges to keep in mind—especially as your cloud environment grows more complex.
Lack of Automation
Many cost management tasks—like rightsizing resources, applying custom logic, or reacting to anomalies—still require manual setup or third-party tools. Native tools are more focused on visibility than automatic optimization.
Costs of Analysis
Accessing detailed cost data via the CUR can require data storage, processing, and visualization tooling (like Athena, QuickSight, or external platforms), which may add to your overall cloud bill.
Pricing Model Complexity
Understanding AWS pricing involves navigating a mix of on-demand rates, tiered pricing, Savings Plans, Reserved Instances, and free tier limits. Misinterpreting these models can lead to unexpected costs.
Ongoing Management
Staying on top of changes in usage, service pricing, and discount coverage requires continuous monitoring. Without dedicated FinOps practices, it’s easy to miss savings opportunities or let costs grow unnoticed.
What are the Features of AWS Cost Management?
Some of the most useful features include AWS Cost Explorer, Anomaly Detection, Budgets, and AWS Savings Plans.
AWS Cost Explorer: If you want to dive deep into how you used your cloud spend, use the AWS cost explorer. This tool has a dashboard showing the cost of each AWS service. The cost explorer also gives reports on the usage of Reserved Instances. The cost explorer shows how costs vary with time. Users can use data from the past year to forecast future spending.
AWS Cost Anomaly Detection: Cost anomaly detection features help your organization find any unusual consumption of cloud resources. Monitoring unusual usage early enough helps prevent skyrocketing costs. AWS uses machine-learning technology to do real-time monitoring of your infrastructure. If the usage patterns deviate from the normal, AWS sends a notification via email or SMS. AI features give the cost explorer deep visibility when detecting the real cause for skyrocketing costs.
AWS Budgets: Use AWS Budgets to define how you use your money in the cloud. This feature helps organizations understand whether they’re running out of funds. For example, you can estimate the costs of running resources and set up a variable monthly budget. You can even set commands that pause resources when you exceed your monthly budget. The AWS Budgeting service can also send alerts whenever you reach a given percentage of your budget.
AWS Savings Plans and Reserved Instances: AWS users can get significant discounts when they reserve compute capacity with AWS Savings Plans and Reserved Instances. Given the same compute capacity, the total cost of running an EC2 instance on Savings plans could be 70% lower than typical on-demand rates. You can view services eligible for savings plans on the cost management dashboard.
AWS Right-Sizing Recommendations: With a wide array of servers and disks to choose from, it’s possible to overestimate what you need to run your workloads. AWS, however, can help you identify and right size resources with low CPU utilization.
Start Managing Your AWS Billing and Cost Management with nOps
nOps is an all-in-one AWS cost optimization platform that simplifies AWS billing and helps users reduce their costs by up to 60% on autopilot. nOps makes it easy to allocate your AWS costs and get complete visibility into spending. It also intelligently manages all your compute and pricing discounts automatically so you get optimal performance and costs.
Features include:
- AWS Visibility: understand 100% of your AWS costs with dashboards, reports, container cost allocation, budgets & cost tracking, and more
- Commitment Management: automatic life-cycle management of your AWS Reserved Instances and Savings Plans with the industry’s only 100% utilization guarantee
- Compute Optimizer: automatically optimizes your compute resources end-to-end, reducing waste at the container, node and pricing level with visibility down to the pod or container level
- Waste Reduction: automate time-consuming cloud optimization tasks like pausing idle resources, scheduling resources, optimizing storage, etc.
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AWS MAP Tracker: maximizes MAP funding, automatically tags resources, and tracks credits for efficient cloud migration
nOps was built to make it simple and easy for engineers to get visibility with dead simple integrations and time-saving automations. It manages $2 billion in AWS spend for its customers and was recently named #1 in G2’s cloud cost management category. Features include:
You can book a demo to find out how nOps can help you start saving today.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the Billing and Cost Management console in AWS?
The AWS Billing and Cost Management console is the central place to manage your AWS account’s financials. It provides access to your current and past invoices, usage reports, payment methods, tax settings, and tools for budgeting and forecasting. From this console, you can view charges by service, track usage patterns, and analyze trends. AWS Billing Management also connects to features like Cost Explorer, AWS Budgets, and Savings Plans, helping you monitor, control, and optimize cloud spend across accounts or organizations.
How do I access the billing console in AWS?
To access the AWS Billing and Cost Management console, log in to the AWS Management Console, click your account name (or number) in the top-right corner, and select “Billing and Cost Management” from the dropdown menu. Alternatively, you can go directly to the Billing Console. From there, you can view invoices, set up budgets, analyze costs, and configure billing alerts. Access is limited to users with the appropriate IAM permissions, so ensure your account has the necessary roles enabled.
What is the difference between AWS Billing and Cost Management and Cost Explorer?
AWS Billing and Cost Management is the overarching console for handling all cost-related activities: viewing invoices, paying bills, managing budgets, and configuring cost allocation. Cost Explorer is a tool within that console, specifically designed for visualizing cost and usage trends. It offers charts and reports that help you understand spending patterns across services, time periods, and linked accounts. In short: Billing and Cost Management is the control center, while Cost Explorer is the analytics engine that helps you dive into the data.
What is the Cost Management tool in AWS?
AWS Cost Management refers to the collection of tools that help you track, allocate, and control cloud spending. This includes Cost Explorer for visual analysis, AWS Budgets for threshold-based alerts, cost allocation tags for organizing spend, and reports for tracking usage by account or resource. These tools are all accessible via the Billing and Cost Management console. Together, they enable teams to monitor cloud costs in real time, allocate expenses to business units, and identify opportunities to optimize spending.
