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Budget And Cost

Activate IAM Access to Billing Information

By default, IAM users and roles won't have access to Billing information. We need to enable a configuration using the root account to allow them to access the Billing and Cost Management console.

Set permission:

  • Log in as root user
  • Go to the Account Dashboard
  • Scroll down to "IAM user and role access to Billing information"
  • Enable the checkbox "Activate IAM Access"

Now the Admin user should be able to access the Billing and Cost Management console.

Note: The Activate IAM Access setting alone doesn’t grant IAM users and roles the necessary permissions for these console pages. In addition to activating IAM access, you must also attach the required IAM policies to those users or roles. If this setting is deactivated, IAM users and roles in this account can’t access the Billing and Cost Management console pages, even if they have administrator access or the required IAM policies.

Billing Overview

In the Bills section, you can find useful information about your billing such as the total amount of your bill, which services you are using, and how much you are spending on each service, in which region, and so on.

You can also see the free tier usage of your services, so you can know how much you are using and how much you have left.

Creating Budget Alarm

To get alerts about upcoming costs, the best thing to do is to create a budget alarm so that we can track our cost and get notified when we reach a certain threshold.

Free Tier - Zero spend budget

Create a budget that notifies you once your spending exceeds $0.01 which is above the AWS Free Tier limits.

Account => Budgets => Create budget

  • Use a template (simplified)
  • Template: Zero spend budget
  • Budget name: My Zero-Spend Budget
  • Add your email to the recipients list
  • Create budget

Now you will be notified via email when any spend is incurred.

Monthly Cost Budget

  • Use a template (simplified)
  • Template: Monthly cost budget
  • Budget name: My Monthly Cost Budget
  • Budgeted amount: $10
  • Add your email to the recipients list
  • Create budget

You will be notified when:

  1. your actual spend reaches 85%
  2. your actual spend reaches 100%
  3. if your forecasted spend is expected to reach 100%.