💸Exam Guide: Cloud Practitioner
Domain 4: Billing, Pricing, and Support
📘Task Statement 4.2
🎯 What Is This Task Testing?
You need to know where AWS cost information comes from and which tools answer which questions:
- Where to get Billing Support and Billing Information
- Where to find Pricing Information for AWS services
- How AWS Organizations affects billing (consolidated billing and cost allocation)
- How Cost Allocation Tags work and how they show up in reports
- When to use:
- AWS Budgets
- AWS Cost Explorer
- AWS Pricing Calculator
- AWS Cost and Usage Report (CUR)
1) 💡 Core Billing and Pricing Information Sources
Billing support and billing info
Billing and payments are handled through AWS’s billing tools in the console,AWS provides billing visibility and support options through its billing experience and support plans.
Typical uses:
- view invoices and charges
- manage payment methods
- get help with billing issues
Pricing information for AWS services
AWS pricing information is available publicly on service pricing pages and via estimation tools such as the Pricing Calculator below
“estimate monthly cost before deploying” → Pricing Calculator.
2) 🧰 Cost Management Tools
AWS Cost Explorer
AWS Cost Explorer is a tool to visualize and analyze your historical AWS spending.
Use AWS Cost Explorer When:
- you want to see trends over time (day/month)
- you want to break down costs by service, account, or tag
- you want to identify what’s driving spend increases
“analyze past spend,” “cost trends,” “break down by service” → Cost Explorer.
AWS Budgets
AWS Budgets is a tool to plan and monitor spend/usage and send alerts.
Use AWS Budgets When:
- you want alerts when cost or usage exceeds (or is forecasted to exceed) a threshold
- you want to enforce budget awareness for teams/projects
“notify when costs exceed $X” / “budget alerts” → AWS Budgets.
AWS Pricing Calculator
The AWS Pricing Calculator is used to estimate the cost of AWS services before you build.
Use AWS Pricing Calculator When:
- you’re planning a new workload and want a cost estimate
- you want to compare architecture options and their expected monthly cost
“estimate cost ahead of time” → Pricing Calculator.
3) 🏢 AWS Organizations
Consolidated Billing and Cost Allocation
AWS Organizations can combine multiple AWS accounts under one organization.
Consolidated billing
With consolidated billing:
- you receive one bill for multiple accounts
- charges are tracked per member account, but billed centrally
- it supports easier cost management and allocation across accounts
“multiple accounts, one bill” → consolidated billing with AWS Organizations.
Allocation of Costs
Even with one consolidated bill, you can still:
- see costs per account
- allocate costs using tagging strategies
4) 🏷️ Cost Allocation Tags and Billing Reports
Cost allocation tags help you label resources so you can track cost by things like:
- department/team
- project
- application
- environment (dev/test/prod)
- cost center
Types of cost allocation tags
- AWS-generated tags: created by AWS (for certain resources)
- User-defined tags: created by you (most common for internal reporting)
How tags relate to billing reports
Once activated/used properly, tags can appear in:
- Cost Explorer breakdowns
- billing reports, including the AWS Cost and Usage Report (CUR)
5) 🧾 AWS Cost and Usage Report (CUR)
The Cost and Usage Report is AWS’s most detailed billing dataset.
Use AWS Cost and Usage Report When:
- you need highly detailed line-item usage and cost data
- you want deep analysis, reporting, or integration with analytics tools
“most detailed billing report” / “line-item costs and usage” → Cost and Usage Report (CUR).
✅ Quick Exam-Style Summary
- Pricing Calculator: estimate future cost before deploying
- Cost Explorer: analyze historical spend and trends
- Budgets: set budgets and get alerts/forecasts
- Billing Conductor: custom billing views and chargeback/showback
- AWS Organizations: consolidated billing across accounts
- Cost allocation tags: attribute spend by team/project/app
- Cost and Usage Report (CUR): most detailed cost/usage data for reporting and analytics
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