Control Your AWS Costs

Open the Free Tier page, so you can keep this step-by-step guide open. On the AWS Free Tier page, under the AWS Free Tier Details header, choose the 12 months free link.

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These free tier offers are only available to new AWS customers, and are available for 12 months following your AWS sign-up date. When your 12 month free usage term expires or if your application use exceeds the tiers, you simply pay standard, pay-as-you-go service rates (see each service page for full pricing details).

Notable offers for the first 12 months following your AWS account sign-up include some level of free usage for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), and many other useful services.

On the AWS Free Tier page, choose the Always free link to view the Always free offers.

As the name suggests, these free tier offers do not automatically expire at the end of your 12-month AWS Free Tier term and are available to all AWS customers.

Notable Always free offers include some level of free usage for AWS Lambda, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon CloudWatch, and many other useful services.

On the AWS Free Tier page, choose the Free trials link to view the Free trials offers.

Trial offers allow you to use a service for a specified period of time or number of operations. 

Notable trial offers include Amazon SageMaker, Amazon GuardDuty, Amazon Redshift, and many other useful services.

After you have logged in to your account, from the account menu, choose Billing Dashboard.

Once you reach the AWS Billing Dashboard page, you can view a summary of your month-to-date costs in the AWS Summary section, as well as the cost trend for your top five services for the most recent three to six closed billing periods in the Cost trend by top five services section.

To dive deeper into your Free Tier eligible usage, choose Free Tier from the left navigation pane.

In the Summary section on the AWS Free Tier page, all of your usage of services in the Free Tier are listed. In addition to your Current usage, your forecasted service usage by the end of the month is detailed in the Forecasted usage column.

In the example screenshot, note that the forecasted usage of EC2 is 2 GB-mo. Exceeding the limit of the Free Tier generally results in a billable charge.

By default, most accounts are automatically opted in to receive AWS Free Tier Usage Limit email alerts when their service usage exceeds 85% of a given Free Tier usage limit. 

To change who gets these email alerts, choose Billing Preferences from the left navigation bar. 

To opt other people in to receive Free Tier Usage Alerts, in the Email Address field, add their email address and choose Save preferences.

From the navigation menu on the left, select Budgets then choose Create a budget on the AWS Budgets console page. 

On the Choose budget type page, choose Cost budget under Budget types.

On the Set your budget page, edit the Budget name field to read MyMonthlyBudget. 

In the Set budget amount section, keep the default selections for Period, Budget renewal type, Start month, and Budgeting method. Enter $100 in the Enter your budgeted amount ($) field. 

In the Budget scope section, you can use these features to create budgets that track costs associated with a particular set of AWS services, linked accounts, tags, or other usage dimensions. For this tutorial, keep these values as the default and choose Next.

On the Configure alerts page, you can have AWS Budgets contact you and others by email when budget conditions are met. 

Choose Add an alert threshold.

Configure the alert to be triggered when actual costs are greater than 80% of budgeted amount, as shown in the screen shot. Add your email address and the email address of anyone who should receive this alert in the Email recipients field.

From the Configure alerts page, choose Add alert threshold.

Configure this alert to be triggered when forecasted costs are greater than 100% of the budgeted amount, as shown in the screen shot. Add your email address and the email address of anyone who should receive this alert in the Email recipients field.

Choose Next to view the attach actions page.

A budget action allows you to define and trigger cost-saving responses to reinforce a cost-conscious culture. You have the option to attach actions that run whenever your alert threshold has been exceeded, such as stopping an EC2 instance from incurring any further costs. You can select the alerts to which you would like to attach actions, then define these actions. 

Choose Next to review the budget details on the Review page.

Review your budget and then choose Create budget to create the budget and alerts.

After the budget has been created, you see a list AWS Budgets you have created. It is a best practice to create a total monthly cost budget for each AWS account that you use. 

You can create up to 62 budget days per month using the AWS Budgets service within the Free Tier limit. After that, you simply pay as you go to create additional budgets.

To dive deeper into your budget details, select your new budget.

From there, you can view your budget details, access a budget performance summary, and inspect your historical budget performance.