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, each representing a different method of accounting for your cloud service charges. This provides 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.

• List Cost: List Cost reflects public cloud pricing, showing what you would pay without discounts, commitments, or Enterprise Discount Plans. It provides a clear, unbiased view of your cloud spend, making cost analysis easier.

Cost Type Mapping Across Providers

Finout standardizes cost calculations across cloud providers and services, ensuring a consistent and accurate view of spending. The table below outlines how Finout's cost types align with different providers.

	AWS	Azure	GCP	Snowflake	Datadog	Confluent	OCI
Unblended	Unblended	Actual	Cost	Cost	Cost	Amount	Cost / MyCost
Net Unblended	Net Unblended	Actual	Cost	Cost	Cost	Amount	Cost / MyCost
Amortized	Amortized	Amortized	Cost	Cost	Finout’s Amortization Calculation	Amount	Cost / MyCost
Net Amortized	Net Amortized	Amortized	Cost	Cost	Finout’s Amortization Calculation	Amount	Cost / MyCost
Blended	Blended	Amortized	Cost	Cost	Cost	Amount	Cost / MyCost
List Cost	Public Pricing	Not Available	Public Pricing	Not Available	Not Available	Not Available	Not Available
FairShare Cost	Finout FairShare Calculation	Not Available	Not Available	Not Available	Not Available	Not Available	Not Available
Net FairShare Cost	Finout Net FairShare Calculation	Not Available	Not Available	Not Available	Not Available	Not Available	Not Available

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