Amazon EC2 payment transparency, breaking the free usage tier?

11
votes

I was attracted by the AWS free tier to give EC2/S3 a try. However, one thing I'm worried about is the payment process. There's quite a few management menus and it doesn't seem entirely transparent when I would break the free usage tier (or if I decide to pay, when I break that usage tier).

You can download .csv usage reports, but I wish the billing/usage monitoring was a little more interactive so I don't get unpleasantly surprised. Does anyone have experiences EC2, is there some aspect of the management interface that makes this a easier/less worrisome?

2
amazon-s3amazon-ec2amazon-web-servicesamazon

2 Answers

10
votes

You can monitor your AWS resource usage and the resulting fees here:

AWS Account Activity
https://aws-portal.amazon.com/gp/aws/developer/account/

You can see how current the report is at the top. In my experience it lags by a few hours, which is pretty amazing if you think of how many different customers AWS has and how many little things they have to keep track of to calculate your fees (e.g., every disk I/O request and network byte sent).

Click "Expand All Services" to see the usage/fees broken down even more.

Note: You don't "decide to pay". You already gave AWS your credit card and agreed to pay according to their fee structure. If your resource usage goes over the free tier, AWS will automatically charge your credit card at the end of the month. Monitor the above page regularly to make sure your charges are accumulating as expected.

2
votes

Use AWS Billing Alerts to notify when you exceeds the fee tier,

If you currently use the AWS Free Tier, you can set a billing alert to notify you if you exceed the free tier by setting a threshold of $0.00.

refer to,

AWS Billing Alerts