Managing your costs with AWS Budgets

AWS Budgets enable you to plan your service usage, service costs, and instance reservations. Budgets provide you with a way to see the following information:

How close your plan is to your budgeted amount or to the free tier limits

Your usage to date, including how much you have used of your Reserved Instances (RIs)

Your current estimated charges from AWS and how much your predicted usage will incur in charges by the end of the month

How much of your budget has been used

AWS Budgets information is updated up to three times a day. Updates typically occur between 8 to 12 hours after the previous update. Budgets track your unblended costs, subscriptions, refunds, and RIs. You can create the following types of budgets:

Cost budgets – Plan how much you want to spend on a service.

Usage budgets – Plan how much you want to use one or more services.

RI utilization budgets – Define a utilization threshold and receive alerts when your RI usage falls below that threshold. This lets you see if your RIs are unused or under-utilized.

RI coverage budgets – Define a coverage threshold and receive alerts when the number of your instance hours that are covered by RIs fall below that threshold. This lets you see how much of your instance usage is covered by a reservation.

Savings Plans utilization budgets – Define a utilization threshold and receive alerts when the usage of your Savings Plans falls below that threshold. This lets you see if your Savings Plans are unused or under-utilized.

Savings Plans coverage budgets – Define a coverage threshold and receive alerts when your Savings Plans eligible usage that is covered by Savings Plans fall below that threshold. This lets you see how much of your instance usage is covered by Savings Plans.

You can create up to 20,000 budgets for each account or AWS Organizations master account. For regular accounts, your first 62 budget days are free of charge each month. Each additional budget day costs $0.02. 62 budget days are equivalent to your first two budgets per month being free. For accounts in a consolidated billing family, the 62 budget days can be allocated across multiple accounts. For example, for 62 accounts with 1 budget in each account, the first day of the month is free for each budget. The remaining days of the month will be charged at $.02 per budget, per day. You can set up optional notifications that warn you if you exceed, or are forecasted to exceed, your budgeted amount for cost or usage budgets or fall below your budgeted amount for RI budgets. You can have notifications sent to an Amazon SNS topic, to an email address, or to both. For more information, see Creating an Amazon SNS topic for budget notifications. AWS Free Tier usage alerts through AWS Budgets are provided for you and don't count toward your budget limits. AWS provides budgets for informational purposes only. You can't use budgets to stop or control other services.

If you use consolidated billing in an organization and you own the master account, you can use IAM policies to control access to budgets by member accounts. By default, owners of member accounts can create their own budgets but can't create or edit budgets for other users. You can create IAM users with permissions that allows them to create, edit, delete, or read budgets in a specific account. However, we do not support cross-account usage. A budget is only visible to users with access to the account that created the budget, and has access to budget itself. For example, a master account can create a budget that tracks a specific member account's cost, but the member account can only view the same budget if they receive access to the master account. For more information, see Overview of managing access permissions. For more information about AWS Organizations, see the AWS Organizations User Guide.