How to disable Cost Explorer?

Question

I'm going crazy with this one. I shut down all usage of every service a year ago. Yet I'm still getting billed every month for a few dollars. And all the charges are from cost explorer itself. The only active reports I have there are all locked and undeletable. Somehow the service that is supposed to save money is the only thing charging me.

I'm about to nuke my account because there does not seem to be any way to disable the service. Very frustrated. Any help would be great.

Answer

Do you have Hourly and Resource Level Data turned on in Cost Explorer?  Go to The Cost Explorer console and scroll down on the left to Preferences.  If this is enabled, this might be why you are seeing charges

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/11/aws-cost-explorer-supports-hourly-resource-level-granularity/

If you go to Cost Explorer, Filter by Service: "Cost Explorer", and then Group by: "Usage Type", you will see "xxx-CostDataStorage ($)" if you scroll down below the chart which validates this is the  Hourly and Resource Level Data charge.

Also, if you have Cost and Usage Reports enabled, you will still be billed for the CUR storage at standard S3 rates.  You can go to the Billing console and remove and Cost and Usage Reports as well, and delete the data in the bucket if you no longer need it.

Answer

If you are accessing Cost Explorer via API, then you will be billed for those API requests (Using cost explorer through the console is free).  See
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cost-management/latest/userguide/ce-what-is.html and
https://aws.amazon.com/aws-cost-management/pricing/

So you will need to check and see if something is using the Cost Explorer API.  If you have CloudTrail turned on, you should be able to see where it is coming from. See:
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/awsaccountbilling/latest/aboutv2/logging-using-cloudtrail.html

Also see the different API call available
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/aws-cost-management/latest/APIReference/API_Operations.html

Answer

Hi,
I have a similar problem, and I have a sneaky suspicion it's the AWS activity itself.
In my case, I federated my accounts into an organisation and the master account presents all the budgeting/cost explorer data. And to do that, master accounts need to query the sandbox account. And the sandbox account noted $10 worth of API calls... Therefore managing the accounts became more expensive than the accounts themselves :) AWS magic for you. I have no other scripts/tools to monitor that -only federation + budget alarms.

Kind regards
Dave

How to disable Cost Explorer?

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