AWS Cost Explorer pricing calculator
API Request and Hourly Granularity Costs. Estimate your costs using AWS list prices.
Estimates from AWS list prices, not an AWS quote. Discounts, taxes and credit terms may affect your bill.
01 · How AWS Cost Explorer pricing works
What you pay for
- Console: free.
- API: $0.01 per paginated request (custom billing views per source).
- Hourly and resource-level granularity: $0.01 per 1,000 usage records per month (14-day lookback).
Common cost traps
- Third-party FinOps tools that poll the API frequently can generate thousands of billed requests.
- Hourly granularity is billed on every usage record in the account.
Ways to reduce cost
- Use the Cost and Usage Report (CUR 2.0/Data Exports) in S3 with Athena for bulk analysis.
- Cache API results and reduce polling frequency.
Free Tier & account eligibility
Free Tier depends on account age. Accounts created on or after 15 July 2025 get a $100 sign-up credit plus up to $100 more for completing onboarding activities; on the Free plan these last 6 months (or until used up), on the Paid plan unused Free Tier credits stay usable for 12 months from sign-up. Accounts created before 15 July 2025 keep the legacy Free Tier (12-month offers plus always-free offers). Always-free offers apply on both plans. The Cost Explorer console is free on all plans.
02 · AWS credits & runway
Do credits cover AWS Cost Explorer?
Cost Explorer API requests and hourly/resource-level granularity are billed by AWS and are offset by credits. General rules: credits only offset charges from the billing cycle in which they were applied onward (never past bills), they apply only to the services listed on the credit in Billing and Cost Management > Credits, they expire on the date shown there, and accounts on the AWS Free plan cannot receive Activate credits until they upgrade to the Paid plan.
Check my creditsExcluded charges & conditions
- Upfront payments for Savings Plans and Reserved Instances (All Upfront, and the upfront part of Partial Upfront). The recurring hourly fee of a No Upfront commitment is billed as normal usage and can be offset.
- AWS Marketplace charges (Activate credits make an exception for third-party foundation models used through Amazon Bedrock).
- AWS Enterprise Support, Enterprise On-Ramp, Unified Operations, resold support and partner-led support.
- Amazon Route 53 domain name registration and transfer fees.
- Taxes (sales, use, VAT and similar), AWS Professional Services, Training and Certification, Mechanical Turk, AWS Managed Services, and any use for cryptocurrency mining.
Illustrative credit runway
Single-service examples from the supplied data, not your calculator result. Months = credit amount ÷ monthly cost, before credit expiry. Credits can expire before these theoretical months are used; coverage and other AWS services can shorten runway.
| Usage profile | Monthly estimate | $10,000 | $25,000 | $100,000 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Small | $5.00 | 2,000.0 mo. | 5,000.0 mo. | 20,000.0 mo. |
| Medium | $105.00 | 95.2 mo. | 238.1 mo. | 952.4 mo. |
| Large | $1,100.00 | 9.1 mo. | 22.7 mo. | 90.9 mo. |
Small profile assumptions
Console use only (free) plus 500 API requests | API requests: 500 requests x $0.01 = $5.00 | Total ~$5.00/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
Medium profile assumptions
10,000 API requests, hourly granularity on 500,000 usage records | API requests: 10,000 requests x $0.01 = $100.00; Hourly granularity: 500 1,000 usage records x $0.01 = $5.00 | Total ~$105.00/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
Large profile assumptions
100,000 API requests (FinOps tooling), hourly granularity on 10 M usage records | API requests: 100,000 requests x $0.01 = $1,000.00; Hourly granularity: 10,000 1,000 usage records x $0.01 = $100.00 | Total ~$1,100.00/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
04 · Questions
AWS Cost Explorer pricing FAQ
Is Cost Explorer free?
The console is free. API requests cost $0.01 each and hourly granularity is billed per usage record.
How can I see credit usage?
Filter by charge type (Credit) in Cost Explorer, or view Billing and Cost Management > Credits.
Do credits cover Cost Explorer API charges?
Yes, they are AWS charges.
What is cheaper for large-scale analysis?
Data Exports (CUR) to S3 queried with Athena.
05 · Sources & estimate notes
Content pack dated 2026-10-19. Calculator rates remain their existing snapshots; this content update is not a price refresh.
Verification notes
- Runway prices come from the calculator repository snapshot rate card cost-explorer (no AWS Price List mapping in the build). Confirm the main unit prices on https://aws.amazon.com/aws-cost-management/aws-cost-explorer/pricing/ before publishing.