How to create AWS Budget

AWS Budgets is a powerful tool provided by AWS to help manage your AWS costs and usage. In this article, we shall discuss how to create AWS Budget. If you are a “Free Tier” user, you will also benefit greatly by configuring AWS budget and this is also beneficial to AWS customers in order not to exceed their budget. Please see How to manage costs with AWS Budgets, how to perform Cost Management in Azure Using Cost Analysis Tool, and How to Control Cloud Cost Using Azure VM.

Since this article is basically created to help the users of the Free Tiers etc to avoid unexpected charges during or after the Free Tier. It is important that we discuss the available free options in AWS.

1. Always Free: These services are free to use indefinitely with certain usage limits. An example of this is the 750 hours per month of Amazon EC2 compute capacity, 5 GB of Amazon S3 storage, and 750 hours per month of Amazon RDS database usage.
2. 12-Months Free: Available to new AWS customers upon AWS account creation/registration. This offer includes free limited usage of popular services for one year. After the 12-month period, standard pay-as-you-go rates apply, and with this, it makes sense to keep track of your budget as you cannot extend the Free Trail Eligibility.
3. Trials: Trials offer short-term free access to specific services not covered by the Always Free or 12-Months Free categories.  An example of this is the ability to explore Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra) for 3 months, Amazon SageMaker for 2 months, and Amazon QuickSight for 30 days etc.

Note: There are a lot of AWS services that you can explore. Yes, when there are cost surprises at the first time, AWS can help waive this. But I would recommend implementing some preventive measures by configuring AWS budgets.

Create AWS Budget

Navigate to the following URL, and click on “Create budget”.

I will select the “Use a template (simplified) option and then a Zero spend budget template. If this is not your use case, please choose the right option.

Enter a budget name and your recipient email address(es) for the alerts. These email addresses can be separated by a comma.

When done, click on “Create budget”.

Please see How to change or cancel your Trello plan, How to Check and Reset Network Data Usage in Windows 11, and how to Grant Non-Domain Admin Privileges to Manage Workstation.

Review alert Details

As you can see, we have successfully created our budget alert on AWS. Therefore, when the configured threshold is exceeded. We will be notified and then we can take actions very quickly.

To review the details, click on the AWS budget name.

You should be able to view the budget settings, status of the threshold etc.

Billing history, and alerts etc view.

You could also view the monthly cost history.

On the billing and cost management dashboard, you will be able to have an overview of the entire cost breakdown, summary, recommendation etc.

Email Alert Notification

As mentioned, when the threshold is exceeded. You will get an email similar to this.

Note: there are no expiration notification for the free tier services

Note: When your free Tier eligibility expires. You will be charged at the standard AWS billing rates for usage. Therefore, I would recommend you terminate all the resource you do not need.

I hope you found this article on how to create AWS Budget very useful. Please feel free to leave a comment below.