AWS Cost and Usage Report
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What is AWS Cost and Usage Report
AWS Cost and Usage Report (CUR) is an AWS billing data export that delivers detailed line-item usage and cost records to an Amazon S3 bucket for analysis and chargeback/showback. It is used by finance, FinOps, and cloud operations teams to build reporting, allocate costs across accounts and tags, and feed downstream analytics tools. CUR emphasizes completeness and granularity of AWS billing data rather than providing an opinionated optimization UI, and it is commonly paired with query/BI services for analysis.
Granular line-item billing data
CUR provides detailed records for AWS usage, costs, credits, and discounts at a line-item level suitable for allocation and audit. It supports cost allocation constructs such as linked accounts and resource tags (when tagging and cost allocation are configured). This level of detail is useful for building internal cost models and reconciling invoices.
S3-based export for analytics
CUR delivers data to Amazon S3 on a schedule, enabling durable storage and integration with common data processing patterns. Teams can query the exported files using AWS analytics services or external data platforms. This makes CUR a practical source-of-truth dataset for custom dashboards and automated pipelines.
Native AWS billing integration
CUR is produced directly from AWS billing systems, reducing the need to collect usage data from multiple service APIs. It aligns with AWS billing constructs such as payer/linked accounts and consolidated billing. This helps standardize reporting across large multi-account environments.
Not a full FinOps UI
CUR is primarily a data export and does not provide built-in interactive cost exploration, anomaly detection, or optimization workflows on its own. Users typically need additional tooling to visualize trends, investigate drivers, and manage savings actions. Organizations looking for an out-of-the-box cost management application may find CUR insufficient by itself.
Setup and modeling complexity
Effective use often requires data engineering work to parse, normalize, and model the exported files for reporting. Data volume can be large, and schema choices (e.g., columns included) affect downstream performance and cost. Governance items like tag hygiene and account structure also materially impact report quality.
AWS-only scope
CUR covers AWS billing data and does not natively consolidate costs across other cloud providers or on-prem environments. Multi-cloud organizations must integrate additional datasets and normalize them to achieve unified reporting. This can increase operational overhead for cross-platform cost allocation.
Plan & Pricing
Pricing model: Pay-as-you-go
Summary: AWS Cost and Usage Reports (AWS CUR) is provided as a billing data export delivered to an Amazon S3 bucket you own. AWS CUR does not have subscription tiers listed on the official product or documentation pages; instead, customers incur charges for the underlying AWS services used to store, transfer, and analyze the CUR files (for example: Amazon S3 storage & requests, data transfer; Amazon Athena query costs; Amazon Redshift ingestion/compute; Amazon QuickSight BI/visualization usage). See official AWS docs and pricing pages for each service.
Free tier/trial: Not stated on CUR product/docs pages (see notes below).
Example costs (official AWS pricing pages):
- Amazon S3 — storage, requests, and data transfer are billed per S3 pricing (see Amazon S3 pricing page). (region- and storage-class-specific rates apply).
- Amazon Athena — SQL queries billed based on data scanned (example: $5 per TB scanned shown in Athena examples); Provisioned Capacity and Apache Spark options also described on Athena pricing page.
- Amazon Redshift — if you load CUR data into Redshift, you will be charged according to Redshift pricing (provisioned or serverless) and storage.
- Amazon QuickSight — BI/visualization billing (per-user or capacity pricing) applies when using QuickSight dashboards on CUR data.
Discounts / Options: Use standard AWS volume/commitment discounts, reserved pricing, or capacity pricing where applicable (per the individual service pricing pages).
Seller details
Amazon Web Services, Inc.
Seattle, Washington, USA
2006
Subsidiary
https://aws.amazon.com/
https://x.com/awscloud
https://www.linkedin.com/company/amazon-web-services/
