AWS Billing and Cost Management vs OpenCost

AWS Billing and Cost Management helps organizations handle AWS invoices and review, organize, forecast, and manage cloud costs. The Bills page provides downloadable invoices and detailed monthly billing data. Cost Explorer visualizes costs and usage over time, with filters and groupings such as account and service, and projects future costs from historical and current patterns. AWS Budgets can alert users when spending or usage thresholds are crossed or forecast to be crossed, and track Reservations and Savings Plans utilization and coverage. Cost Anomaly Detection identifies unusual spending and possible causes, with alerts sent individually or in daily or weekly summaries by SNS or email. Cost Categories sorts cost and usage data into customer-defined groupings and can be used with Cost Explorer, AWS Budgets, and the Cost and Usage Report. The service is listed at free, but some features have usage charges. Cost Explorer API requests cost $0.01 per primary billing view request or $0.01 per source for custom billing view requests. Hourly granularity has a 14-day lookback and applies to specified cost and usage data.

OpenCost is a vendor-neutral open source project for measuring and allocating Kubernetes and cloud infrastructure costs. It breaks down costs in real time to Kubernetes concepts and containers for showback, chargeback, and reporting. Allocation covers CPU, GPU, memory, load balancers, and persistent volumes, and it can monitor cloud resources outside Kubernetes. The included web UI visualizes Kubernetes allocations and related cloud costs. Its API provides real-time and historical Kubernetes cost reports using on-demand list prices and cloud provider cost and usage reports. Listed cloud providers include Alibaba, AWS, GCP, Microsoft Azure, Open Telekom Cloud, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, OVHcloud, Scaleway, and STACKIT. Metrics and visualization integrations include Prometheus, Cortex, Thanos, Victoria Metrics, Grafana, and Grafana Cloud. OpenCost requires a Kubernetes cluster and Prometheus; Helm is recommended for full functionality. Cloud costs appear when provider billing data becomes available, usually several hours to 24 hours later, and on-demand pricing is not reconciled against billed actual costs. Cloud costs are not supported for on-premises clusters. OpenCost is free under Apache 2.0.