Customers can track their AWS usage and view their estimated bill using the AWS Management Console: AWS - Sign In to the AWS Management Console . Because UW-Madison AWS accounts are AWS linked accounts, not all billing features are available. Below is a summary of some of the features that are available to UW-Madison AWS account holders.  Note that AWS updates the console views so these directions may not be 100% accurate.  If you do find any directions below unusable, please provide feedback on this KB doc directly.

The AWS Cost Explorer can be found in the Cost Management service. It is a free service that lets you analyze your account's resource cost over time. It has pre-configured graphs that provide useful insights intoyour resource cost over time. You can filter based on many different attributes and edit the date range to get the information you want. You can also export the usage breakdown as a CSV and save custom reports so you can repeat them in the future. 

Here is a link to the official cost explorer documentation to learn more: Exploring your data using Cost Explorer - AWS Cost Management (amazon.com)

Budget Alerts can be found in the Cost Management service. You can use predefined templates to make a budget such as the overall monthly cost, that will alert you if your actual cost or projected cost will exceed the amount you budgeted. You can also create custom budgets for more control of what you want to alert on. These alerts are sent to an email or emails that you define when creating the budget.

Here is a link to the official budget documentation to learn more: Creating a budget - AWS Cost Management (amazon.com)

Savings plans allow you to potentially save money by committing to a certain time frame of using a resource, this discount goes up to 72% off if you commit to the longest time period. For instance, if you know you are hosting a workload in EC2 for a year you can use a savings plan to get a substantial discount over paying as you go. There is also a feature that can make recommendations based on past usage and recommend a savings plan to use. It will show you the discount and the amount you will save every month. See the picture below for an example of what this looks like. Here is a link to the savings plan documentation: What are Savings Plans? - Savings Plans (amazon.com)