Learning objectives

In this module, you will learn how to:

• Describe AWS pricing and support models.

• Describe the AWS Free Tier.

• Describe key benefits of AWS Organizations and consolidated billing.

• Explain the benefits of AWS Budgets.

• Explain the benefits of AWS Cost Explorer.

• Explain the primary benefits of the AWS Pricing Calculator.

• Distinguish between the various AWS Support Plans.

• Describe the benefits of AWS Marketplace.

AWS Free Tier

The AWS Free Tier(opens in a new tab) enables you to begin using certain services
without having to worry about incurring costs for the specified period.

Three types of offers are available:

• Always Free

• 12 Months Free

• Trials

For each free tier offer, make sure to review the specific details about exactly
which resource types are included.

To learn more the AWS Free Tier, expand each of the following three categories.

Always Free

These offers do not expire and are available to all AWS customers.

For example, AWS Lambda allows 1 million free requests and up to 3.2 million
seconds of compute time per month. Amazon DynamoDB allows 25 GB of free
storage per month.

12 Months Free

These offers are free for 12 months following your initial sign-up date to AWS.
Examples include specific amounts of Amazon S3 Standard Storage, thresholds for
monthly hours of Amazon EC2 compute time, and amounts of Amazon CloudFront
data transfer out.

Trials

Short-term free trial offers start from the date you activate a particular service. The
length of each trial might vary by number of days or the amount of usage in the
service.

For example, Amazon Inspector offers a 90-day free trial. Amazon Lightsail (a
service that enables you to run virtual private servers) offers 750 free hours of
usage over a 30-day period.

The correct response option is 12 months.

The AWS Free Tier consists of three types of offers that allow customers to use
AWS services without incurring costs: Always free, 12 months free, and Trials.

For 12 months after you first sign up for an AWS account, you can take advantage
of offers in the 12 Months Free category. Examples of offers in this category
include specific amounts of Amazon S3 Standard Storage, thresholds for monthly
hours of Amazon EC2 compute time, and amounts of Amazon CloudFront data
transfer out.
How AWS pricing works

AWS offers a range of cloud computing services with pay-as-you-go pricing.

To learn more about how AWS pricing works, expand each of the following three
categories.

Pay for what you use

For each service, you pay for exactly the amount of resources that you actually
use, without requiring long-term contracts or complex licensing.

Pay les when you reserve

Some services offer reservation options that provide a significant discount

compared to On-Demand Instance pricing.

For example, suppose that your company is using Amazon EC2 instances for a
workload that needs to run continuously. You might choose to run this workload on
Amazon EC2 Instance Savings Plans, because the plan allows you to save up to
72% over the equivalent On-Demand Instance capacity.

Pay les with volumen-based discounts when you use more.

Some services offer tiered pricing, so the per-unit cost is incrementally lower with
increased usage.

For example, the more Amazon S3 storage space you use, the less you pay for it per
GB.

AWS Pricing Calculator

The AWS Pricing Calculator(opens in a new tab) lets you explore AWS services
and create an estimate for the cost of your use cases on AWS. You can organize
your AWS estimates by groups that you define. A group can reflect how your
company is organized, such as providing estimates by cost center.

When you have created an estimate, you can save it and generate a link to share it
with others.
Suppose that your company is interested in using Amazon EC2. However, you are
not yet sure which AWS Region or instance type would be the most cost-efficient
for your use case. In the AWS Pricing Calculator, you can enter details, such as the
kind of operating system you need, memory requirements, and input/output (I/O)
requirements. By using the AWS Pricing Calculator, you can review an estimated
comparison of different EC2 instance types across AWS Regions.

AWS pricing examples

This section presents a few examples of pricing in AWS services.

AWS Lambda

To learn more about AWS Lambda pricing(opens in a new tab), choose each of the
following two tabs.

AWS LAMBDA PRICING

For AWS Lambda, you are charged based on the number of requests for your
functions and the time that it takes for them to run.

AWS Lambda allows 1 million free requests and up to 3.2 million seconds of
compute time per month.

You can save on AWS Lambda costs by signing up for a Compute Savings Plan. A
Compute Savings Plan offers lower compute costs in exchange for committing to a
consistent amount of usage over a 1-year or 3-year term. This is an example of
paying less when you reserve.
PRICING EXAMPLE

If you have used AWS Lambda in multiple AWS Regions, you can view the itemized
charges by Region on your bill.

In this example, all the AWS Lambda usage occurred in the Northern Virginia
Region. The bill lists separate charges for the number of requests for functions and
their duration.

Both the number of requests and the total duration of requests in this example are
under the thresholds in the AWS Free Tier, so the account owner would not have to
pay for any AWS Lambda usage in this month.

Amazon EC2 PRICING

To learn more about Amazon EC2 pricing(opens in a new tab), choose each of the
following two tabs.

With Amazon EC2, you pay for only the compute time that you use while your
instances are running.

For some workloads, you can significantly reduce Amazon EC2 costs by using Spot
Instances. For example, suppose that you are running a batch processing job that
is able to withstand interruptions. Using a Spot Instance would provide you with up
to 90% cost savings while still meeting the availability requirements of your
workload.

You can find additional cost savings for Amazon EC2 by considering Savings Plans
and Reserved Instances.

The service charges in this example include details for the following items:

• Each Amazon EC2 instance type that has been used

• The amount of Amazon EBS storage space that has been provisioned

• The length of time that Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) has been used

In this example, all the usage amounts are under the thresholds in the AWS Free
Tier, so the account owner would not have to pay for any Amazon EC2 usage in this
month.
Amazon S3

To learn more about Amazon S3 pricing(opens in a new tab), choose each of the
following two tabs.

For Amazon S3 pricing, consider the following cost components:

• Storage - You pay for only the storage that you use. You are charged the rate
to store objects in your Amazon S3 buckets based on your objects’ sizes,
storage classes, and how long you have stored each object during the
month.

• Requests and data retrievals - You pay for requests made to your Amazon
S3 objects and buckets. For example, suppose that you are storing photo
files in Amazon S3 buckets and hosting them on a website. Every time a
visitor requests the website that includes these photo files, this counts
towards requests you must pay for.

• Data transfer - There is no cost to transfer data between different Amazon

S3 buckets or from Amazon S3 to other services within the same AWS
Region. However, you pay for data that you transfer into and out of Amazon
S3, with a few exceptions. There is no cost for data transferred into Amazon
S3 from the internet or out to Amazon CloudFront. There is also no cost for
data transferred out to an Amazon EC2 instance in the same AWS Region as
the Amazon S3 bucket.

• Management and replication - You pay for the storage management

features that you have enabled on your account’s Amazon S3 buckets.
These features include Amazon S3 inventory, analytics, and object tagging.

The AWS account in this example has used Amazon S3 in two Regions: Northern
Virginia and Ohio. For each Region, itemized charges are based on the following
factors:
 • The number of requests to add or copy objects into a bucket

• The number of requests to retrieve objects from a bucket

• The amount of storage space used

All the usage for Amazon S3 in this example is under the AWS Free Tier limits, so
the account owner would not have to pay for any Amazon S3 usage in this month.

Billing Dashboard

Use the AWS Billing & Cost Management dashboard(opens in a new tab) to pay
your AWS bill, monitor your usage, and analyze and control your costs.

• Compare your current month-to-date balance with the previous month, and
get a forecast of the next month based on current usage.

• View month-to-date spend by service.

• View Free Tier usage by service.

• Access Cost Explorer and create budgets.

• Purchase and manage Savings Plans.

• Publish AWS Cost and Usage Reports(opens in a new tab).

• Consolidated billing
• In an earlier module, you learned about AWS Organizations, a service that
enables you to manage multiple AWS accounts from a central location. AWS
 Organizations also provides the option for consolidated billing(opens in a new
tab).
• The consolidated billing feature of AWS Organizations enables you to receive a
single bill for all AWS accounts in your organization. By consolidating, you can
easily track the combined costs of all the linked accounts in your organization.
The default maximum number of accounts allowed for an organization is 4, but
you can contact AWS Support to increase your quota, if needed.
• On your monthly bill, you can review itemized charges incurred by each
account. This enables you to have greater transparency into your organization’s
accounts while still maintaining the convenience of receiving a single monthly
bill.
• Another benefit of consolidated billing is the ability to share bulk discount
pricing, Savings Plans, and Reserved Instances across the accounts in your
organization. For instance, one account might not have enough monthly usage to
qualify for discount pricing. However, when multiple accounts are combined,
their aggregated usage may result in a benefit that applies across all accounts in
the organization.
• To review and example of consolidated billing, choose the arrow buttons to
display the four steps.

STEP 1

Suppose that you are the business leader who oversees your company’s AWS
billing.

Your company has three AWS accounts used for separate departments. In this
example, Account 1 owes $19.64, Account 2 owes $19.96, and Account 3 owes
$20.06. Instead of paying each location’s monthly bill separately, you decide to
create an organization and add the three accounts.
You manage the organization through the primary account.

Continuing the example, each month AWS charges your primary payer account for
all the linked accounts in a consolidated bill. Through the primary account, you
can also get a detailed cost report for each linked account.

The monthly consolidated bill also includes the account usage costs incurred by
the primary account. In this case, the primary account incurred $14.14. This cost is
not a premium charge for having a primary account.

The consolidated bill shows the costs associated with any actions of the primary
account (such as storing files in Amazon S3 or running Amazon EC2 instances).
The total charged to the paying account, including the primary account and
accounts one through three, is $73.80.

Consolidated billing also enables you to share volume pricing discounts across
accounts.

Some AWS services, such as Amazon S3, provide volume pricing discounts that
give you lower prices the more that you use the service. In Amazon S3, after
customers have transferred 10 TB of data in a month, they pay a lower per-GB
transfer price for the next 40 TB of data transferred.

In this example, there are three separate AWS accounts that have transferred
different amounts of data in Amazon S3 during the current month:
 • Account 1 has transferred 2 TB of data.

• Account 2 has transferred 5 TB of data.

• Account 3 has transferred 7 TB of data.

Because no single account has passed the 10 TB threshold, none of them is

eligible for the lower per-GB transfer price for the next 40 TB of data transferred.

Conclusion

Now, suppose that these three separate accounts are brought together as linked
accounts within a single AWS organization and are using consolidated billing.

When the Amazon S3 usage for the three linked accounts is combined (2+5+7),
this results in a combined data transfer amount of 14 TB. This exceeds the 10-TB
threshold.

With consolidated billing, AWS combines the usage from all accounts to
determine which volume pricing tiers to apply, giving you a lower overall price
whenever possible. AWS then allocates each linked account a portion of the
overall volume discount based on the account's usage.

In this example, Account 3 would receive a greater portion of the overall volume
discount because at 7 TB, it has transferred more data than Account 1 (at 2 TB) and
Account 2 (at 5 TB).

AWS Budgets

AWS Budgets

In AWS Budgets(opens in a new tab), you can create budgets to plan your service
usage, service costs, and instance reservations.

The information in AWS Budgets updates three times a day. This helps you to
accurately determine how close your usage is to your budgeted amounts or to the
AWS Free Tier limits.
In AWS Budgets, you can also set custom alerts when your usage exceeds (or is
forecasted to exceed) the budgeted amount.

Example: AWS Budgets

Suppose that you have set a budget for Amazon EC2. You want to ensure that your
company’s usage of Amazon EC2 does not exceed $200 for the month.

In AWS Budgets, you could set a custom budget to notify you when your usage has
reached half of this amount ($100). This setting would allow you to receive an alert
and decide how you would like to proceed with your continued use of Amazon
EC2.

To learn more about AWS Budgets, choose each of the numbered markers.

In this sample budget, you can review the following important details:

• The current amount that you have incurred for Amazon EC2 so far this
month ($136.90)

• The amount that you are forecasted to spend for the month ($195.21),
based on your usage patterns.

You can also review comparisons of your current vs. budgeted usage, and
forecasted vs. budgeted usage.

For example, in the top row of this sample budget, the forecasted vs. budgeted bar
is at 125.17%. The reason for the increase is that the forecasted amount ($56.33)
exceeds the amount that had been budgeted for that item for the month ($45.00).

AWS Cost Explorer

AWS Cost Explorer

AWS Cost Explorer(opens in a new tab) is a tool that lets you visualize,
understand, and manage your AWS costs and usage over time.

AWS Cost Explorer includes a default report of the costs and usage for your top five
cost-accruing AWS services. You can apply custom filters and groups to analyze
your data. For example, you can view resource usage at the hourly level.

Example: AWS Cost Explorer

This example of the AWS Cost Explorer dashboard displays monthly costs for
Amazon EC2 instances over a 6-month period. The bar for each month separates
the costs for different Amazon EC2 instance types, such as t2.micro or m3.large.

By analyzing your AWS costs over time, you can make informed decisions about
future costs and how to plan your budgets.

AWS Support Plans

AWS Support

AWS offers four different Support plans(opens in a new tab) to help you
troubleshoot issues, lower costs, and efficiently use AWS services.

You can choose from the following Support plans to meet your company’s needs:
 • Basic

• Developer

• Business

• Enterprise On-Ramp

• Enterprise

Basic Support

Basic Support is free for all AWS customers. It includes access to whitepapers,
documentation, and support communities. With Basic Support, you can also
contact AWS for billing questions and service limit increases.

With Basic Support, you have access to a limited selection of AWS Trusted Advisor
checks. Additionally, you can use the AWS Personal Health Dashboard, a tool
that provides alerts and remediation guidance when AWS is experiencing events
that may affect you.

If your company needs support beyond the Basic level, you could consider
purchasing Developer, Business, Enterprise On-Ramp, and Enterprise Support.

Developer, Business, Enterprise On-Ramp, and Enterprise Support

The Developer, Business, Enterprise On-Ramp, and Enterprise Support plans

include all the benefits of Basic Support, in addition to the ability to open an
unrestricted number of technical support cases. These Support plans have pay-by-
the-month pricing and require no long-term contracts.

The information in this course highlights only a selection of details for each
Support plan. A complete overview of what is included in each Support plan,
including pricing for each plan, is available on the AWS Support(opens in a new
tab) site.

In general, for pricing, the Developer plan has the lowest cost, the Business and
Enterprise On-Ramp plans are in the middle, and the Enterprise plan has the
highest cost.

To learn more about AWS support plans, expand each of the following four
categories.
To learn more about AWS support plans, expand each of the following four
categories.

Developer Support

Customers in the Developer Support plan have access to features such as:

• Best practice guidance

• Client-side diagnostic tools

• Building-block architecture support, which consists of guidance for how to

use AWS offerings, features, and services together

For example, suppose that your company is exploring AWS services. You’ve heard
about a few different AWS services. However, you’re unsure of how to potentially
use them together to build applications that can address your company’s needs. In
this scenario, the building-block architecture support that is included with the
Developer Support plan could help you to identify opportunities for combining
specific services and features.

Customers with a Business Support plan have access to additional features,

including:

• Use-case guidance to identify AWS offerings, features, and services that

can best support your specific needs

• All AWS Trusted Advisor checks

• Limited support for third-party software, such as common operating

systems and application stack components

Suppose that your company has the Business Support plan and wants to install a
common third-party operating system onto your Amazon EC2 instances. You could
contact AWS Support for assistance with installing, configuring, and
troubleshooting the operating system. For advanced topics such as optimizing
performance, using custom scripts, or resolving security issues, you may need to
contact the third-party software provider directly.

Enterprise On-ramp Support

In November 2021, AWS opened enrollment into AWS Enterprise On-Ramp

Support plan. In addition to all the features included in the Basic, Developer, and
Business Support plans, customers with an Enterprise On-Ramp Support plan
have access to:

• A pool of Technical Account Managers to provide proactive guidance and

coordinate access to programs and AWS experts

• A Cost Optimization workshop (one per year)

• A Concierge support team for billing and account assistance

• Tools to monitor costs and performance through Trusted Advisor and Health
API/Dashboard

Enterprise On-Ramp Support plan also provides access to a specific set of

proactive support services, which are provided by a pool of Technical Account
Managers.

• Consultative review and architecture guidance (one per year)

• Infrastructure Event Management support (one per year)

• Support automation workflows

• 30 minutes or less response time for business-critical issues

Enterprise Support.

In addition to all features included in the Basic, Developer, Business, and

Enterprise On-Ramp support plans, customers with Enterprise Support have
access to:

• A designated Technical Account Manager to provide proactive guidance and

coordinate access to programs and AWS experts

• A Concierge support team for billing and account assistance

• Operations Reviews and tools to monitor health

• Training and Game Days to drive innovation

• Tools to monitor costs and performance through Trusted Advisor and Health
API/Dashboard

The Enterprise plan also provides full access to proactive services, which are
provided by a designated Technical Account Manager:

• Consultative review and architecture guidance

• Infrastructure Event Management support

 • Cost Optimization Workshop and tools

• Support automation workflows

• 15 minutes or less response time for business-critical issues

Technical Account Manager (TAM)

The Enterprise On-Ramp and Enterprise Support plans include access to a

Technical Account Manager (TAM).

The TAM is your primary point of contact at AWS. If your company subscribes to
Enterprise Support or Enterprise On-Ramp, your TAM educates, empowers, and
evolves your cloud journey across the full range of AWS services. TAMs provide
expert engineering guidance, help you design solutions that efficiently integrate
AWS services, assist with cost-effective and resilient architectures, and provide
direct access to AWS programs and a broad community of experts.

For example, suppose that you are interested in developing an application that
uses several AWS services together. Your TAM could provide insights into how to
best use the services together. They achieve this, while aligning with the specific
needs that your company is hoping to address through the new application.
The correct response option is Business.

Only the Business, Enterprise On-Ramp, and Enterprise Support plans include all
AWS Trusted Advisor checks. Of these three Support plans, the Business Support
plan has a lower cost.

AWS Marketplace

AWS Marketplace

AWS Marketplace(opens in a new tab) is a digital catalog that includes thousands

of software listings from independent software vendors. You can use AWS
Marketplace to find, test, and buy software that runs on AWS.

For each listing in AWS Marketplace, you can access detailed information on
pricing options, available support, and reviews from other AWS customers.

You can also explore software solutions by industry and use case. For example,
suppose your company is in the healthcare industry. In AWS Marketplace, you can
review use cases that software helps you to address, such as implementing
solutions to protect patient records or using machine learning models to analyze a
patient’s medical history and predict possible health risks.

AWS Marketplace categories

AWS Marketplace offers products in several categories, such as Infrastructure

Software, DevOps, Data Products, Professional Services, Business Applications,
Machine Learning, Industries, and Internet of Things (IoT).

Within each category, you can narrow your search by browsing through product
listings in subcategories. For example, subcategories in the DevOps category
include areas such as Application Development, Monitoring, and Testing.

In Module 8, you learned about the following concepts:

• Three types of offers included in the AWS Free Tier: 12 months free, Always
free, and Trials

• Benefits of consolidated billing in AWS Organizations

• Tools for planning, estimating, and reviewing AWS costs

• Differences between the five AWS Support plans: Basic, Developer,

Business, Enterprise On-Ramp, and Enterprise

• How to discover software in AWS Marketplace

To start the module summary video, choose the play button.

The correct response option is: Combine usage across accounts to receive
volume pricing discounts.

The other response options are incorrect because:

• Review how much cost your predicted AWS usage will incur by the end of
the month - You can perform this action in AWS Budgets.

• Create an estimate for the cost of your use cases on AWS - You can perform
this action in AWS Pricing Calculator.

• Visualize and manage your AWS costs and usage over time - You can
perform this action in AWS Cost Explorer.
The correct response option is AWS Cost Explorer.

AWS Cost Explorer includes a default report of the costs and usage for your top five
cost-accruing AWS services. You can apply custom filters and groups to analyze
your data. For example, you can view resource usage at the hourly level.

The other response options are incorrect because:

• AWS Pricing Calculator enables you to create an estimate for the cost of
your use cases on AWS.

• AWS Budgets enables you to create budgets to plan your service usage,
service costs, and instance reservations. In AWS Budgets, you can also set
custom alerts when your usage exceeds (or is forecasted to exceed) the
budgeted amount.

• The AWS Free Tier is a program that consists of three types of offers that
allow customers to use AWS services without incurring costs: Always free,
12 months free, and Trials.
The correct response option is AWS Budgets.

In AWS Budgets, you can set custom alerts that will notify you when your service
usage exceeds (or is forecasted to exceed) the amount that you have budgeted.

Your budget can be based on costs or usage. For example, you can set an alert that
will notify you when you have incurred $100.00 of costs in Amazon EC2 or 500,000
requests in AWS Lambda.

The other response options are incorrect because:

• From the billing dashboard in the AWS Management Console, you can view
details on your AWS bill, such as service costs by Region, month to date
spend, and more. However, you cannot set alerts from the billing
dashboard.

• The AWS Free Tier is a program that consists of three types of offers that
allow customers to use AWS services without incurring costs: Always free,
12 months free, and Trials.

• AWS Cost Explorer is a tool that enables you to visualize, understand, and
manage your AWS costs and usage over time.
The correct response option is Enterprise.

A Technical Account Manager (TAM) is available only to AWS customers with the
Enterprise On-Ramp and Enterprise Support plans. A TAM provides guidance,
architectural reviews, and ongoing communication with your company as you
plan, deploy, and optimize your applications.
The correct response option is AWS Marketplace.

AWS Marketplace is a digital catalog that includes thousands of software listings

from independent software vendors. You can use AWS Marketplace to find, test,
and buy software that runs on AWS.

The other response options are incorrect because:

• The AWS Free Tier consists of offers that allow customers to use AWS
services without incurring costs. These offers are related to AWS services,
not third-party software that can be used on AWS.

• AWS Support is a resource that can answer questions about best practices,
assist with troubleshooting issues, help you to identify ways to optimize
your use of AWS services, and so on.

• You can use the billing dashboard in the AWS Management Console to view
details such as service costs by Region, the top services being used by your
account, and forecasted billing costs. From the billing dashboard, you can
also access other AWS billing tools, such as AWS Cost Explorer, AWS
Budgets, and AWS Budgets Reports.