AWS Cost Explorer

AWS Cost Explorer shows your spending over time with basic charts. The interface is stupidly slow compared to paid alternatives like CloudHealth or CloudZero which start around $500+ per month.

AWS bills are basically incomprehensible without some kind of visual breakdown. Cost Explorer provides that breakdown but the interface is painfully slow. Loading a basic service breakdown takes 30+ seconds, which is why everyone bitches about it.

What It Actually Does (The Good Stuff)

Cost Explorer pulls data from AWS Cost and Usage Reports and creates basic charts. Without it, you're downloading CSV files and building spreadsheets like a caveman.

What works:

• Monthly cost breakdowns by service - shows whether EC2 or data transfer costs are eating your budget
• Account-level analysis for multi-account setups - useful with AWS Organizations
• Reserved Instance tracking - monitors RI utilization (one of the few things that doesn't suck)
• Basic forecasting - predicts next month's bill (works for stable workloads, completely wrong for anything with variable traffic)

The 38-month historical data helps with annual budget planning if you can wait for it to load.

Integration Reality Check

Cost Explorer integrates with AWS Budgets for alerts and AWS Cost Anomaly Detection for unusual spending notifications. Basic but functional.

The AWS Organizations support works well for multiple accounts. You can view costs by organizational unit, which is useful for figuring out which team is burning through the budget this month.

What Sucks About It

Main problems:

• 24-hour data delay - Cost data is always delayed, so good luck catching a runaway bill
• Slow performance - Charts load slower than Windows 95
• No real-time alerts - Need AWS Budgets for immediate notifications
• API costs - $0.01 per request adds up fast with automation

The forecasting works poorly for variable workloads. If your traffic isn't as predictable as a grandfather clock, the predictions are basically useless.

Most teams start with Cost Explorer but upgrade to CloudHealth or CloudZero within 6-12 months because the interface drives them insane.

Basic Cost Charts and Why They're Slow

Cost Explorer provides line charts, bar charts, and stacked area charts. Loading times are painfully slow - a monthly breakdown by service typically takes 15-30 seconds. These performance issues are well documented by frustrated users.

The 38-month historical data helps identify long-term spending trends if you have the patience to wait for it. Each additional filter makes it even slower. AWS documentation casually mentions these "interface limitations" like it's no big deal.

Filtering by service, account, region, and tags works for basic cost analysis. Tagging-based cost allocation requires consistent resource tagging, which most teams fuck up because nobody remembers to tag shit consistently.

Forecasting That's Hit or Miss

The machine learning forecasting uses 13 months of historical data. It works reasonably well for steady workloads like long-running RDS instances. For applications with variable traffic patterns, the predictions are basically random numbers.

The confidence intervals are ridiculously wide for unpredictable workloads. AWS acknowledges this limitation in their docs, which is corporate speak for "this shit doesn't work for most real applications."

Cost Comparison Feature

AWS added Cost Comparison functionality for automatic month-over-month change analysis. Actually useful for understanding why your bill jumped 40% this month.

The "Top Trends widget" shows the 10 biggest cost changes and categorizes them by usage, pricing, or credit changes. Saves you from manually comparing charts like a caveman.

Resource-Level Data (Costs Extra, Obviously)

Resource-level data for individual EC2 instances and RDS databases costs $0.01 per 1,000 usage records monthly. This adds up quickly in large environments because AWS loves nickel and diming you.

Auto-scaling workloads generate tons of usage records - each instance start/stop creates records. The pricing calculator doesn't include these Cost Explorer charges because that would be too helpful.

Resource-level data is available for:

• Past 14 days at daily granularity (free)
• Past 14 days at hourly granularity (paid, naturally)
• Custom resource groups if your resources are tagged consistently (spoiler: they're not)

API Access (More Expensive Than You Think)

The Cost Explorer API costs $0.01 per request. This gets expensive fast with automation that queries frequently. We burned through $200/month just checking if we were overspending.

For regular monitoring, many teams use Cost and Usage Report files instead of API calls because AWS charges you to check how much they're charging you.

Main Limitations

Key problems include:

• No real-time alerts - Need AWS Budgets for immediate cost notifications
• Multi-account navigation - Switching between accounts is slow (results cache for ~15 minutes)
• Limited customization - Basic dashboard options only
• CSV export limitations - Export functionality is garbage
• Forecasting assumptions - Assumes steady usage patterns, useless for variable workloads

The 24-hour data delay means cost spikes aren't visible until the following day. Good luck catching a runaway bill before it nukes your budget.

Teams needing immediate cost visibility often move to CloudHealth or use Cost and Usage Reports for custom solutions. Most companies migrate to third-party tools within 6-12 months because the interface performance becomes unbearable.