If you've ever opened a cloud bill and thought, "Okay, but what does all this actually mean?" — welcome to the club.
AWS, Azure, and GCP give you plenty of billing data. Every resource, every operation, every region — lots of details, lots of numbers.
Technically, everything is there.
Practically, good luck figuring out where your money goes without spending half your afternoon on it.
As engineers, we love raw data. Give us logs, IDs, timestamps, and a terminal, and we're happy. But when it comes to cloud costs, sometimes you just want a simple answer to a simple question:
What exactly are we paying for?
The problem with raw billing data
Cloud billing data can be very detailed. That's useful when you're investigating a specific resource or tracking down an unexpected charge.
But try to understand your overall spending from a long list of technical billing records.
You might see charges related to EBS volumes, snapshot storage, data transfer, compute resources, and dozens of other usage types.
You can dig through individual records, compare amounts, and calculate totals yourself.
Or you can do what most people do: open the report, stare at it for a while, and promise yourself you'll investigate it properly tomorrow.
Tomorrow, of course, brings another report.
We thought there should be a more straightforward way to look at this data.
Raw data is great. Raw data for everything? Not so much.
We didn't want to hide the technical details. Sometimes you really need them.
Instead, we wanted to give users two ways to look at their cloud costs.
Raw data is for digging into the details: individual records, resource identifiers, regions, usage amounts, and costs.
Kind of usage by Binadox takes those records and groups them into logical usage categories.
Instead of looking at a long list of billing entries, you can see what types of resources you're paying for, how much you've consumed, and how much each category contributes to the bill.
For example, storage-related charges can be easier to understand when you can see EBS volume usage and snapshot storage grouped into recognizable categories rather than scattered across individual records.
The idea isn't complicated. We just wanted the data to answer questions instead of creating new ones.
So, what does Kind of usage actually show?
For each usage category, you can see things like:
- Usage volume — how much of a resource you've consumed, such as GB-months.
- Charged cost — the amount charged for that category.
- Credits — credits applied, where applicable.
- Net cost — the resulting cost after credits.
- Share of charges — the percentage of total charges represented by that category.
This makes it easier to spot which categories account for a significant part of your spending and decide where to investigate further.
And if something looks suspicious, you can go back to Raw data and inspect the underlying records.
No magic. No need to pretend that a dashboard can replace technical investigation. Just a more useful starting point.
Why we built it this way
When working with cloud costs, there's a difference between knowing your total bill and understanding it.
A total tells you how much you owe.
A categorized view helps explain where that amount comes from.
That's what Kind of usage by Binadox is designed to do for AWS, Azure, and GCP: turn detailed billing records into a more readable breakdown of resource consumption and cost.
Because cloud infrastructure is already complicated enough. Understanding the bill shouldn't require a detective board, red string, and three cups of coffee.
And yes, sometimes you'll still need the raw data. We're engineers, after all. We wouldn't want to take that away from you.
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