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Use Cost Explorer in the AWS Billing and Cost Management console - AWS Cost Management
Forecasting your data for Cost Explorer with our new AWS experienceConsiderations

Use Cost Explorer in the AWS Billing and Cost Management console

Warning

We're currently releasing our new experience to a limited number of customers. You might not be able to access this experience yet.

The following information is about using Cost Explorer in the AWS Billing and Cost Management console when you're using our new AWS experience. If you created your account using Sign up for AWS (advanced) or activated advanced features, see Analyzing your costs and usage with Cost Explorer.

You can view and analyze your costs and usage with Cost Explorer. You can view your costs in three unique cost and usage graphs, and you can compare usage across a variety of dimensions and forecast your future spending. Cost Explorer is also available programmatically. For more information about the AWS Cost Explorer API, see the AWS Billing and Cost Management API Reference.

Forecasting your data for Cost Explorer with our new AWS experience

A forecast is a prediction of how much you will use AWS services over the forecast time period that you selected. This forecast is based on your past usage. You can use a forecast to estimate your AWS bill and set alarms and budgets for based on predictions. Because forecasts are predictions, the forecasted billing amounts are estimated and might differ from your actual charges for each statement period.

Like weather forecasts, billing forecasts can vary in accuracy. Different ranges of accuracy have different prediction intervals. The higher the prediction interval, the more likely the forecast has a wider range. For example, suppose that you have a budget set to 100 dollars for a given month. An 80% prediction interval might forecast your spend between 90 and 100, with a mean of 95. The range in the prediction band is dependent on your historical spend volatility, or fluctuations. The more consistent and predictable the historical spend, the narrower the prediction range in forecast spend.

Cost Explorer forecasts have a prediction interval of 80%. If AWS doesn't have enough data to forecast an 80% prediction interval, Cost Explorer doesn't provide a forecast. This is common for accounts that have less than one full billing cycle.

Considerations

When using Cost Explorer when you're using our new AWS experience, consider the following:

  • You can access your cost data using the Cost Explorer API. Each paginated API request results in a charge of $0.01. Because you're charged per paginated request, identify the exact dataset you want to access before submitting queries. If you're using an AI agent to access the Cost Explorer API, make sure it is aware of the $0.01 charge.

  • AWS prepares data for the current month, previous 13 months, and forecasts cost data for the next 12 months.

  • It takes AWS about 24 hours to prepare your current month's data. It takes AWS a few more days to complete the preparation for your previous and forecasted data.

  • You can only view Cost Explorer data for one project at a time.

  • All costs reflect your usage up to the previous day.

  • In the current billing period, the data depends on your upstream data from your billing applications, and some data might be updated later than 24 hours.

  • Data transfer costs are included in the services that they're associated with, such as Amazon EC2 or Amazon S3. They aren't represented as either a separate line item in the data table or a bar in the chart.

  • If you choose any forecasted dates, your current date's cost and usage data shows as Forecast and won't include historical data.

Because you're using our new AWS experience, we provide a streamlined version of the Cost Explorer console that helps you understand your costs and usage. Features that aren't covered in the following documentation are not available for our new AWS experience customers.

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