AWS
Cost
Where your AWS money goes — by month, day or hour, grouped by service, region, operation or account.
Your AWS bill, from Cost Explorer, presented so you can actually find things.
Costs come from Cost Explorer, which must be enabled once in your AWS billing console and needs
ce:GetCostAndUsageon the key. See Permissions.
Choosing the view
Granularity — monthly, daily or hourly.
- Monthly for trends: is the bill growing?
- Daily to find the day something changed.
- Hourly to see a spike inside one day.
Group by — service, region, operation or linked account.
- Service is the usual starting point: EC2, S3, RDS, data transfer.
- Region finds resources in places you forgot.
- Operation goes deeper inside a service — which API call is costing.
- Linked account matters only with AWS Organizations.
Month-over-month comparison
Shows this period against the last, with the difference per line. This is the fastest way to answer "why is the bill higher than last month?" — the comparison sorts the change, so the cause is at the top.
Reading it sensibly
- The current month is incomplete. Comparing 12 days against a full 30 is not a trend.
- Data transfer is often the surprise. It hides under EC2-Other and CloudFront.
- Costs appear up to 24 hours late. Something started this morning may not show yet.
- Reserved instances and savings plans change how costs are attributed and can make month-to-month comparisons look odd.
Then what?
Once you know where the money goes, FinOps suggests what to do about it.
You can also ask the assistant: "why did my bill go up $300 this month?" — it reads the same data and explains the change in words.