Posted On: May 7, 2018
Starting today, customers with consolidated billing will receive linked account bills that show each account’s unblended rates and costs.
Previously, linked account bills displayed blended rates and costs. Blended rates are the average cost per unit of usage across all accounts within a customer’s consolidated billing family (calculated by dividing total product costs by total product usage). Blended costs are derived for each linked account by multiplying the blended rate for each product by the linked account’s usage of that product. While the approach of surfacing blended rates and costs in linked account bills provided a way to uniformly distribute costs across accounts, it did not provide linked accounts with visibility into the actual rates and costs incurred within that linked account, including Reserved Instance (RI) discounts and pricing tiers (e.g., AWS Free Tier rates and S3 volume tiers). Providing linked accounts with unblended rate and cost data will allow customers to more easily understand and reconcile their charges across their payer and linked accounts.
Please note that AWS Support charges and tax will now be calculated using the unblended costs. You can still access your blended costs via the AWS Cost and Usage Reports and AWS Cost Explorer.
To learn more about unblended costs, visit the Understanding Consolidated Bills user guide.