UNNECESSARY BILLING

I understand your frustration about being billed for a service that appears to be off or not in use. This is actually a common issue that many AWS users encounter. There are several important distinctions in AWS that could explain why you're still seeing charges:

1. Stopped vs. Terminated: If you've only stopped a service (like an EC2 instance) rather than fully terminating it, you may still incur charges for associated resources. For example, stopped EC2 instances don't incur compute charges, but their attached EBS volumes still generate storage costs.

2. Associated Resources: Many AWS services have related components that continue to incur charges even when the main service appears to be off. For example:

• EBS volumes and snapshots remain billable even when instances are stopped
• Elastic IP addresses that remain allocated but not attached to running instances
• Storage costs for services like RDS or S3

3. Regional Resources: You might have resources running in different AWS regions that you haven't checked.

To resolve this issue:

1. Check your AWS Billing Dashboard to identify exactly which services are generating charges.

2. Review all AWS regions for any running or provisioned resources.

3. Fully terminate (not just stop) any unused resources, and delete associated components like EBS volumes, snapshots, or Elastic IPs.

4. If you're still confused about the charges, you can contact AWS Support by opening a billing support case. Billing support is available for free to all AWS customers, and they can provide account-specific guidance.

For future protection, consider setting up AWS Budgets and billing alerts to notify you when you're incurring costs.
Sources
unexpexted Billing | AWS re:Post
Understanding unexpected charges - AWS Billing
I don't know why I should have paid | AWS re:Post
Billing misunderstand | AWS re:Post

You should use Cost Explorer and then sort the billing by API Operations. That will tell what exactly is incurring the cost. For example, you might have an EC2 instance in stopped state. However, you could still be paying for EBS volumes, backups, snapshots, elastic IP. Cost Explorer will provide you those data.