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Kamban
Kamban

Posted on • Originally published at kambanthemaker.com on

AWS Cost Visualization and Savings

I have been using AWS for a few years now. I love the eco system, how easily the services can work together, starting from S3, DyanmoDB,SES to Lambda. One thing that kept me bothering was the billing interface. I love simplicity, though the AWS Cost explorer is good, sometimes it feels clunky. For a technical person it might look fine, but what about the top level people who want to know where they spend money, how much is the unreserved cost.

Having built https://flatga.io, decided to take advantage of the codebase and built a simple tool to view AWS Cost called https://cloudsavings.io. The key features are,

  • Cost breakup by service
  • Reservation coverage and utilization
  • Cost breakup by accounts and regions
  • Cost forecast
  • Savings recommendations

All the information are pulled using official AWS API. The cost breakup should give you the high level overview of which services are costing you a lot, along with the filters, you can drill down on a few items, like data range, service-wise filtering, region-wise filtering.

Recommendations are split into two, one

  • Reservation recommendation - The default reservation system
  • Savings plan recommendation - The new reservation system specifically for compute devices.

One caveat is AWS Cost Explorer costs $0.01 per request, but we use 48 hour caching to keep your access cost around $1 to $2 per month. As of now, cloudsavings.io costs from $0 to $29 per month based on your monthly bill. If your bill is less than $1000, it's free.

I hope this could help a few people out there who find it difficult to navigate the AWS billing dashboard.

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