Does billing alarm itself cost money?

Question

Sorry if this is a dumb question. I have an AWS account that I do not have intention to use any time soon. So I cleaned all resources I can think of, delete all IAM users except a readonly one and both root/readonly user is guarded with strong password through password manager + MFA. But I am still a little paranoid over the tragedies of hacked AWS account so I want to set up billing alarms for this "frozen" account.

However upon careful examination it looks like 
1. I need to enable Billing Alerts at first, which asks Billing to send data to CloudWatch as a metric, and this is not reversible (you cannot deactivate it anymore)
2. I need then a cloudwatch alarm on this metric.

In that case, am I right that billing alarm itself will cost a small amount each month since it is a cloudwatch tool, and there is no way to turn it off since I cannot deactivate Billing alert?

Thanks!

Answer

We highly recommend using AWS Budgets instead. If you use Budgets for notifications and alerting only https://aws.amazon.com/aws-cost-management/aws-budgets/pricing/ - they are free. You don't pay anything.

If you want to use some extra features (in particular, Budget Actions) - then only first 2 actions-enabled budgets are free, and then you pay a fee for additional ones.

However, using Budgets for billing alerts and notifications only, will not cost you anything.

Answer

As per https://aws.amazon.com/aws-cost-management/aws-budgets/pricing/ the first two budgets are free.

Does billing alarm itself cost money?

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