How to Use AWS Cost Explorer: Understand Your AWS Bill in 30 Minutes

Your AWS bill is a black box. AWS Cost Explorer is the flashlight. This guide shows you exactly how to use it to understand what you're spending, where the waste is, and how to start saving.

What is AWS Cost Explorer?

AWS Cost Explorer is a free tool inside the AWS Console that lets you visualize, understand, and manage your AWS spending. It shows:

• Where your money goes — by service, by account, by region, by tag
• How spending trends over time — daily, monthly, quarterly views
• What's driving cost changes — new services, increased usage, price changes
• Savings opportunities — RI and Savings Plans recommendations
• Forecasts — predicted spend for the next 3 months

Getting Access to Cost Explorer

You need one of these IAM permissions:

• awscostExplorerReadOnlyAccess (AWS managed policy — read-only)
• ce:GetCostAndUsage, ce:GetDimensionValues, ce:GetTags (custom policy)
• Or root account / billing full access

To access: AWS Console → Billing and Cost Management → Cost Explorer

The 5 Views That Actually Matter

1. Cost by Service (The "Where Did My Money Go?" View)

This is the most useful view. It breaks down your spend by AWS service.

How to set it up:

1. Open Cost Explorer
2. Group by: Service
3. Date range: Last 3 months
4. Granularity: Monthly

What to look for: Your top 5 services typically account for 80%+ of your bill. Focus optimization efforts there. For most companies, that's EC2, RDS, S3, CloudFront, and Lambda.

2. Daily Spend Trend (The "Is Something Wrong?" View)

Catches cost spikes early.

1. Granularity: Daily
2. Date range: Last 30 days
3. Group by: Service

Red flags:

• Sudden spikes in any service (someone spun up expensive instances)
• Gradual upward creep (auto-scaling without limits)
• Data transfer costs growing (cross-region or internet egress)

3. Cost by Account (The Multi-Account View)

If you use AWS Organizations, this is critical.

1. Group by: Linked Account
2. Date range: Last 3 months

What to look for: Which accounts are growing fastest? Which have the highest on-demand percentage? Target those accounts for optimization first.

4. RI/Savings Plans Coverage (The "Are You Wasting Money?" View)

This shows what percentage of your usage is covered by discounts.

1. Report type: RI/Savings Plans Coverage
2. Date range: Last 30 days

What to look for: If your coverage is below 50%, you're overpaying significantly. Every hour of on-demand usage is money you could be saving.

5. Savings Plans Utilization (The "Did I Overcommit?" View)

Checks whether your existing commitments are actually being used.

1. Report type: RI/Savings Plans Utilization
2. Date range: Last 30 days

What to look for: Utilization below 80% means you overcommitted. You're paying for capacity you don't use. This is exactly the problem CFDs solve.

Beyond Cost Explorer: Automated Optimization

Cost Explorer tells you where the problems are. But solving them — buying the right Savings Plans, managing RIs, adjusting coverage — is manual and time-consuming.

This is where automated tools like RightSpend/CloudFix come in:

• Automatic analysis: Continuously monitors your usage (like Cost Explorer, but automated)
• Automatic execution: Purchases and manages Convertible Reserved Instances on your behalf
• Automatic adjustments: Exchanges cRIs when instance types change, buys more when usage grows
• Zero commitment: CFDs (Commitment-Free Discounts) give you 40-55% savings with 30-day cancellation

Think of Cost Explorer as the diagnostic tool and RightSpend as the treatment.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does AWS Cost Explorer cost money?

Cost Explorer is free in the AWS Console. The API costs $0.01 per 1,000 requests. You get 1,000 free API calls per month.

How far back can I see data?

Cost Explorer shows the last 12 months of data by default. You can enable hourly granularity for the last 14 days.

What's the difference between Cost Explorer and Cost and Usage Report?

Cost Explorer gives you visual dashboards and basic analysis. The Cost and Usage Report (CUR) gives you detailed CSV data with hourly granularity, including all tags and resource-level data. Use Cost Explorer for quick insights, CUR for deep analysis.