AWS Billing Cost Explorer
Good afternoon everyone,
Please, I have an interpretation doubt regarding AWS Billing. In the documentation and on the invoice, it is stated that for Data Transfer, up to 10 TB/month of data, a charge of $0.015 will apply. However, upon observing the charge made, I notice that approximately 240 MB were added to this transferred volume.
What may raise doubts for me when performing the calculation using the AWS Cost Explorer console. Shouldn't the additional 240 MB of traffic up to 10 TB have been added or calculated using the rate of $0.0138/GB?
Why does this difference exist?
- Newest
- Most votes
- Most comments
Is 1 TB 1000GB or 1024GB? In binary form, 1 TB is 1024 GB, so 10 TB is 10,240 GB. No issues with cost explorer. I have noticed certain AWS services using both 1000 (decimal form) and 1024 (binary form) to represent the form, but in this instance it's the binary form and therefore it looks right.
The difference you're observing between your AWS invoice and Cost Explorer is likely due to how these two systems group and present cost data differently.
In billing data (which appears on your invoice), AWS charges are grouped by AWS services in a specific way. However, Cost Explorer groups costs differently to enable deeper analysis. Specifically, for data transfer costs, there's a key distinction:
- Billing data groups all data transfer costs into a single service called "Data Transfer"
- Cost Explorer groups transfer costs by the individual service that generated them to help you analyze data transfer costs more effectively
This means that the data transfer charges you see in Cost Explorer may be distributed across multiple service categories (like EC2, S3, CloudFront, etc.) rather than consolidated under a single "Data Transfer" line item as they appear on your invoice.
Additionally, Cost Explorer and billing data refresh at different cadences, which can result in slight differences for month-to-date estimated charges. The data you see in Cost Explorer represents usage up to the previous day and is refreshed at least once every 24 hours, while your invoice represents the final calculated charges for the billing period.
To reconcile the difference, you may want to check if Cost Explorer is showing data transfer costs distributed across different AWS services rather than in a single consolidated view. The total should match your invoice when you account for all service categories, though the grouping and presentation will differ.
Sources
Knowing the differences between Billing and Cost Explorer data - AWS Billing
Exploring your data using Cost Explorer - AWS Cost Management
Relevant content
- asked 2 years ago
- asked a year ago
- asked a year ago
- AWS OFFICIALUpdated 4 months ago
I perfectly understood the explanation, however, the 240 MB computed within the range of up to 10 TB should have been calculated within the capacity of $0.138 per GiB/month, with the base value of $0.150 per GiB being restricted to up to 10 TB/month.
The base rate of $0.150 per GiB should be limited to 10 TB/month, which I imagine, by definition, disregarding any costs of fees/taxes, etc., should be a fixed amount of the transferred volume.
For example, if I consumed 13 TB of data in a given period (month), 10 TB (total, without deviations of tens or hundreds of MB) should be calculated at the base rate defined in the documentation, which, in summary, would give us a fixed amount: "If I consumed 13 TB, I understand that of these, my fixed cost will be $1,500. The remaining 3 TB (full value) will be calculated using the base rate of $0.0138/GB."