Cost and Usage Types

When interacting with the Finout MegaBill, whether you're creating a new Data Explorer, building a widget, or using other system features, you can select from various cost and usage types representing a different method of accounting for your cloud service charges, providing detailed insights into your financial data.

Finout adopts AWS’s cost dataset terminology as a standard, ensuring consistency in cost language across all providers and services. The table below provides a clear representation of this cross-platform cost terminology alignment in Finout.

What is a Cost Type?

A cost type indicates how costs are calculated and presented for each cloud service based on the amount of resources used. The default cost setting in Finout is the net amortized cost. If you need to change this default setting, navigate to Settings > Advanced Settings to select a different cost type.

Cost Type Definitions

• Unblended Cost- This is the actual cost as detailed on your invoice, including charges for resources consumed and any upfront costs associated with Reserved Instances or pre-paid services. It reflects the direct expenses recorded and paid by your finance department, ensuring that the charges on the invoice match the actual payments made. Understanding Unblended Costs is essential for accurate financial accounting.

• Net Unblended Cost- The Net Unblended Cost reflects the costs after all applicable discounts have been directly applied to the service. Unlike the standard Unblended Cost, where discounts are usually itemized separately on different lines of the invoice, showing the "regular" costs of services, the Net Unblended Cost integrates these discounts directly into the service costs themselves.

• Amortized Cost- Amortized costs distribute the expenses of commitment payments across the duration of the Commitment Plan (SP, RI), matching costs with the actual service usage. This represents the usage costs of your Committed Plans. In contrast, Unblended Cost accounts for expenses as they occur.

  
• Net Amortized Cost- This cost type represents the total expenses after applying all relevant discounts to the amortized costs.

• Blended Cost- Blended rates average the costs of Reserved Instances and On-Demand Instances across all accounts. The total cost is calculated by dividing the total cost of services by the amount of data stored or the service usage, excluding monthly CSP/RI fees or upfront RI fees.

• FairShare Cost - This cost type eliminates the randomness often seen in AWS's default cost allocation by ensuring discounts are applied fairly across all relevant resources according to actual usage and eligible commitments. This structured approach resolves misaligned costs and inaccurate showback reports, offering a logical and equitable way to allocate savings in environments with multiple teams, regions, and services. Contact Finout support at [e-mail] to enable this feature.

• Net FairShare Cost - The AWS refund is factored into the cost of each included service, with the FairShare formula applied afterward. Conversely, for FairShare costs, the refund (e.g., PrivateRateDiscount) is handled as a separate billing line and excluded from the formula. Contact Finout support at [e-mail] to enable this feature.

Usage Types in Data Explorer

When navigating the Data Explorer or accessing usage units, you can select from various usage types:

• Usage- Refers to the actual consumption of AWS resources, measured in service-specific units like Hours for EC2 instances, the number of S3 GET requests, or data transferred out of AWS.

• Normalized Usage- Standardizes usage across different resources or services to a common scale for easier comparison. This is particularly useful in scenarios like EC2, where instance usage is normalized based on sizes to facilitate comparison across various instance types.

Cross-Platform Cost Terminology Alignment in Finout

Finout’s Cost Type Terminology/ Cost Center	AWS	Azure	GCP	Snowflake	DataDog	Confluent
Unblended	Unblended	Actual	Cost	Cost	Cost	Cost
Net Unblended	Net Unblended	Actual	Cost	Cost	Cost	Cost
Amortized	Amortized	Amortized	Cost	Cost	Finout’s Amortization Calculation	Cost
Net Amortized	Net Amortized	Amortized	Cost	Cost	Finout’s Amortization Calculation	Cost
Blended	Blended	Amortized	Cost	Cost	Cost	Cost

AWS References

• https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws-cloud-financial-management/understanding-your-aws-cost-datasets-a-cheat-sheet/

• https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cost-management/latest/userguide/ce-advanced.html

• https://docs.aws.amazon.com/awsaccountbilling/latest/aboutv2/con-bill-blended-rates.html#Blended_S3_Stand_Storage