Question: What is the difference between AWS Pricing Calculator and AWS Cost Explorer?

Answer

When planning and managing costs on AWS, customers often rely on two tools provided by AWS: the AWS Pricing Calculator and AWS Cost Explorer. While they serve similar high-level goals of helping you understand and manage costs, their use cases, focus, and functionality are quite different.

AWS Pricing Calculator

The AWS Pricing Calculator is primarily used for estimating costs upfront before actually deploying resources. It helps you understand the pricing associated with various AWS services based on specific configurations and usage patterns.

1. Primary Use Case: It allows users to input hypothetical resource configurations (like instance types, storage sizes, etc.) and usage scenarios to get real-time price estimations.

2. Customization: It is highly customizable. You can modify the tool to reflect your expected usage, region, licensing, commitment types, and more.

3. Designed for Planning: AWS Pricing Calculator is best used in the planning phase while you're architecting your systems and trying to understand what your future AWS bill might look like.

4. What it offers:

   • Cost estimates for individual or multiple services.
   • Monthly, annual, and multi-year breakdowns of estimated costs.
   • Helps in evaluating cost impacts of various service configurations.
   • Does not take into account actual usage.

AWS Cost Explorer

AWS Cost Explorer, on the other hand, is a tool for managing, visualizing, and analyzing actual usage and spending in an ongoing AWS environment.

1. Primary Use Case: Cost Explorer lets you monitor and assess your historical AWS usage and spending over time, typically focusing on optimizing and reducing unnecessary spending. It helps with cost visibility post-implementation.

2. Trend Analysis: Cost Explorer provides detailed charts and datasets, helping you analyze trends by service, region, or other criteria across various time ranges.

3. Forecasting: The tool also supports basic forecasting based on your actual usage patterns to project future costs in the context of your current workloads. It provides predictions based on historical data.

4. What it offers:

   • Daily, monthly, or custom reports on existing costs.
   • Resource tagging for granular cost analysis (e.g., projects, teams, organizations).
   • Recommendations for Reserved Instances (RIs) and Savings Plans.
   • Supports detailed cost breakdowns at service, account, or usage-type levels.

Key Differences

Here's a quick summary of the major differences between the two tools:

| Feature | AWS Pricing Calculator | AWS Cost Explorer | |------------------------|---------------------------------------------------------------|----------------------------------------------------------------| | Purpose | Estimate prospective costs before deployment | Analyze actual usage and costs post-deployment | | Focus | Planning and forecasting hypothetical usage | Analyzing current and historical usage | | Customization | Custom configurations for different service combos | Detailed spend and usage breakdown based on real data | | Recommendations | No recommendations | Provides RI and Savings Plan recommendations | | Data Source | Based on hypothetical resource setup | Based on the actual usage incurred | | Cost Breakdown | Shows estimates for individual services | Detailed for each service, region, and even down to specific tags| | Forecast | Limited to hypothetical calculations | Based on historical trend analysis, offering future projections |

When to Use Each Tool

• AWS Pricing Calculator is ideal when you're in the design and planning stages of your cloud strategy and need accurate cost predictions based on the infrastructure you're planning to use.

• AWS Cost Explorer is indispensable once you have resources running on AWS and want detailed insights into how to manage and optimize ongoing costs, including providing recommendations for cost savings (e.g., by purchasing Reserved Instances or using Savings Plans).

In conclusion, both tools serve critical roles at different stages in your cloud lifecycle. The AWS Pricing Calculator is for upfront cost estimations, whereas AWS Cost Explorer is for managing and optimizing costs based on actual usage.