When it comes to managing your AWS spend, there are three native go-to’s: AWS Pricing Calculator, AWS Cost Explorer, and AWS Budgets. Each serves a distinct purpose and can play a critical role in your cost management strategy. But understanding how they differ – and when to use each – is key to getting the most bang for your buck.
In this piece, we’ll walk through each tool in detail, exploring what it does, how it works, and who it’s for.
By the end, you’ll have a clear sense of how to choose the right one for your needs – and why, in most cases, you’ll want to use all three.
What is AWS Pricing Calculator?
Purpose
AWS Pricing Calculator is a planning tool that lets users estimate the cost of AWS services before deploying them. It helps teams get a handle on the likely financial impact of different infrastructure choices by modelling configurations and usage patterns in advance.
How it achieves this
- Choose from a wide range of AWS services and input configuration details like instance types, regions, storage volumes and expected usage
- Group services to represent different parts of a solution or environment
- Get line-by-line estimates to help you understand the cost breakdown
- Save, share or export estimates for wider review – no AWS account required
Best use cases
Engineering teams and solutions architects might use AWS Pricing Calculator when designing new infrastructure or evaluating cost implications of different designs.
It’s also handy for finance or procurement teams who need to understand the potential cost of a proposed cloud project. It shines in the early stages – before anything’s deployed – when decisions are still flexible and cost is a key part of the conversation.
For example
A solutions architect might use AWS Pricing Calculator to compare the monthly cost of running a web app in two different AWS regions, factoring in EC2, S3 and data transfer charges
What is AWS Cost Explorer?
Purpose
AWS Cost Explorer is a reporting and analytics tool used to visualise and understand your actual AWS spend and usage.It helps keep an eye on patterns, cost drivers and also forecasts future spending based on historical data.
How it achieves this
- Pulls data from your AWS account and displays it in user-built dashboards
- Filter and group by service, linked account, region, usage type and tags
- View up to 14 months of historical data and project up to 12 months ahead (at time of writing)
- Use pre-set views to get going quickly, or customise to go deeper
Best use cases
Cost Explorer is made for FinOps teams, engineers or business stakeholders who need to know where money’s going. It’s useful for monthly and quarterly reviews, or for understanding unexpected spikes.
For example
A DevOps team may use AWS Cost Explorer to spot that their staging environment is racking up more compute hours than expected, prompting a check on their auto-scaling settings.
What is AWS Budgets?
Purpose
AWS Budgets is a tool for setting cost or usage limits in your AWS account. It alerts you when your actual or forecasted spend exceeds the thresholds you define, helping teams track budgets and take action early.
How it achieves this
- Set budgets based on cost, usage, Reserved Instance (RI) utilisation or Savings Plan coverage
- Choose thresholds for actual and forecasted spend
- Get alerts via email or Amazon SNS and trigger actions through Lambda (disabling non-essential services etc)
- Budget data updates three times a day, usually with an 8–12 hour delay
Best use cases
AWS Budgets is for teams who need to keep a close eye on spening. Dev teams use it to stay within sandbox limits, and finance teams keep tabs on spend across business units. It really comes into its own in multi-account setups where visibility is harder to maintain.
For example
A product team sets a monthly budget for their development account and gets a mid-month alert saying they’re on track to overspend, giving them time to act early.
AWS Pricing Calculator vs. AWS Cost Explorer vs. AWS Budgets
Use this guide to tell which tool’s for which purpose.
How we can help
As an AWS Advanced Partner, we’ve helped everyone from scale-ups to SMEs achieve their dreams in AWS.
From Cost Explorer to non-native FinOps platforms, we have the certified skills to both reveal trends and make smart decisions to save on your bill.
If you’re ready to shave off spend and dig deeper, we’d love to talk. Drop us a line.
