Create your personalized cost estimate with the enhanced AWS Pricing Calculator (public preview)

Today, we’re excited to announce the enhanced AWS Pricing Calculator that is now available as a public preview feature within the AWS Billing and Cost Management Console. The new capability provides accurate cost estimates for new workloads or modifications to your existing AWS usage by incorporating eligible discounts. You can now save time and improve the accuracy of cost estimation for migrating workloads from one Region to another, modifying existing or planning new workloads, and planning for commitment purchases. To get started, login into the AWS Billing and Cost Management Console and click Pricing Calculator under the “Budget and Planning” section in the left navigation.

A little bit of the history on AWS Pricing Calculator

One of the most common questions you typically ask is: “How much does it cost me to run a workload on AWS?” To address this, we launched the AWS Simple Monthly Calculator in 2007, giving you a quick tool for cost estimate incorporated with the latest pricing change. In 2018, we launched the AWS Pricing Calculator. With its simple UI and broad service coverage, Pricing Calculator quickly become the go-to resource for cost estimation of your AWS workloads. In 2023, we decided to retire the Simple Monthly Calculator, so you can use one tool to explore pricing for all your architecture needs. Since then, we’ve continuously improved and expanded the capabilities of Pricing Calculator.

Prior to today’s launch, you could use AWS Pricing Calculator to assess the cost impact of workloads on AWS. However, you had to incorporate discounts on your own. Additionally, you needed to gather existing usage first in order to make changes. You also built processes to export and manage your cost estimates in order to save or share them with your teams.

The enhanced in-console Pricing Calculator (public preview)

We’ve incorporated your feedback into building the new enhanced version of AWS Pricing Calculator in the AWS Billing and Cost Management Console. First, you can now log into the Pricing Calculator with your AWS account and import your historical AWS usage into your estimates. Additionally, you can save these estimates directly in your account for future reference. Second, you can now estimate the cost of a complete AWS bill using the same computation logic AWS uses to generate your AWS bill. This feature helps you better understand how various discounts, such as Savings Plans and Reserved Instances, affect your overall costs. Third, you can now interactively estimate the cost of specific workloads – subsets of your total AWS usage – while incorporating applicable discounts. To get started, login into the AWS Billing and Cost Management Console and click Pricing Calculator under the “Budget and Planning” section in the left navigation. Now let’s dive into the details.

Two types of estimates

The new Pricing Calculator experience supports two types of cost estimates in public preview: workload estimate and bill estimate.

• With workload estimate, you can interactively model the cost impact for any workload or application modification that automatically includes the net effect of any applicable discounts. If you own an application or are financially responsible for an application or a set of usage within your organization, you’ll find this estimate type useful. This estimate type is available to all AWS accounts: management, member, or regular standalone accounts.
• With bill estimate, a management account user can generate an estimate that allows the inclusion and modeling of adjustments to your Savings Plans and/or Reserved Instances in addition to AWS Service usage changes. This is done by calculating your entire cost and usage in a consolidated bill. The estimate for a consolidated bill is especially beneficial for customers who want to assess scenarios where longer-term commitments are involved while utilizing their cross-account benefit sharing preferences.

You’re probably thinking about many ways to leverage this new Pricing Calculator experience. Truly, you can use it for scenarios, such as, expanding existing or adding new workloads to support new businesses, migrating your workloads to new region(s) for resiliency, performance, or cost optimization reasons, and implementing rightsizing recommendations. Let’s take a look at an example where a customer is looking for a quick answer on a use case where they need to add new Amazon RDS usage while modifying existing Amazon EC2 usage.

Workload estimate

Your team has decided to increase your m5d.16xlarge instance usage from 355 to 1460 hours for the month. There is an estimated cost increase, but you want to see its cost impact together with other workload changes.

You log into AWS Pricing Calculator with your account and create a workload estimate by importing your historical workload with available parameters: date range and filters, e.g. Region, account, tag, cost categories. You can import EC2 service usage only. To do this, you filter by service – Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, create and name a new usage group, and edit the service usage by configuring the details.

Figure 1. Sample screenshot of adding historical EC2 usage to workload estimate

Figure 2. Sample screenshot of modifying details of existing EC2 usage

You will immediately see a comparison between your baseline usage that was filtered and the estimated cost based on the changes made to your EC2 indicated by a “Modified” state.

Figure 3. Sample screenshot of workload estimate landing page

In addition to modifying your existing EC2 usage, your team also want to understand the cost impact of adding new Amazon Aurora MySQL database usage. In this case, you can add to the same workload estimate with new Amazon Aurora usage. To do this, you will add new service usage by filtering “Amazon Relational Database Service” as the service, configure the details for the new Amazon Aurora usage, and see the cost impact immediately.

Figure 4. Sample screenshot of adding new Amazon RDS – Aurora usage

Figure 5. Sample screenshot of configuring details of new Amazon Aurora usage

Upon configuring the new Amazon Aurora usage, you will again see the usage table with immediately updated estimated costs including the Amazon Aurora usage.

Figure 6. Sample screenshot of the updated workload estimate page

Bill estimate

After your team understands the cost impact of growing their workloads, you’ll need to purchase new Savings Plans to cover the incremental usage. The bill estimate feature allows you to model the cost of a complete AWS bill, including both Savings Plans and Reserved Instances. For example, you have increased the monthly usage of EC2 m5d.16xlarge instances will increase from 355 hours to 1,460 hours, and you want to purchase an additional $1.00/hour EC2 Instance Savings Plan to cover this increased usage. You can use Bill Estimate to understand the overall impact. To do this, create a new bill scenario and import your EC2 usage from last month. Then, modify the relevant usage lines to reflect the usage increase and add new Savings Plans to the bill scenario. Once you’ve completed these steps, click ‘Create report’ to start the bill simulation.

Figure 7. Sample screenshot of bill estimate page

Once the simulated bill is generated, you can find the result in the Bill estimates list. You can click on the estimate title, and see the details. The bill estimate results page displays key information on a pre-tax basis about cost and usage for the consolidated bill family. You can see changes to the top seven services and changed cost and usage at a line-item level. For line items, the list will include changed lines for which usage was modified in the scenario as well as usage lines that have changed due to coverage changes from commitments or applicable discounts.

Figure 8. Sample screenshot of bill results page

A few call outs

• Latency: You can get cost estimate instantly with workload estimates. With bill estimate, there can be up to 12 hours wait time, depending on the size of the data to be processed, as AWS needs to run a full billing computation with the new configuration details. This is an asynchronous process, and you’ll receive an email notification upon completion.
• Savings Plans cost modelling: To analyze the cost impact of purchasing individual Savings Plans with different hourly commitment amounts, you can use our newly launched Savings Plans Purchase Analyzer, which allows you to interactively model estimated savings, coverage, and utilization across various purchasing scenarios. If you want to understand the collective cost impact of all existing Savings Plans, Reserved Instances and discounts across your organization usage, incorporating new and modification of your usage and Savings Plans and Reserved Instances, you should use the Bill Estimate feature in Pricing Calculator.

Conclusion

The new Pricing Calculator experience will increase your confidence in cost planning and expedite the process to get the critical answers your organization needs to make important business decisions. For more details see the AWS Pricing Calculator user guide, API documentation, and pricing.