Cost Explorer

Cost Explorer is where you filter, break down, and chart your account’s cost data. This page covers the controls on that page: breakdown dimensions, the Billed/Amortized toggle, tag breakdowns, saved views, the stat strip, and display currency.

Choosing a breakdown dimension

The breakdown table groups cost by one dimension at a time — service, region, account, usage type, or a virtual tag. This is a grain: the same spend is stored once per dimension, so switching dimensions changes what a row represents rather than filtering the same rows.

For example, switching from Service to Region for the same account and date range doesn’t add or remove any total spend — it re-groups the identical dollars by a different column.

Some dimension pairs support a secondary breakdown, which adds a second grouping column inside the primary one (for example, service broken down further by region, where both are tracked together). Not every pair of dimensions is supported — an unsupported combination is rejected rather than silently returning an empty or incorrect breakdown.

Billed vs. amortized

A toggle above the chart switches between Billed (what the provider charged that period) and Amortized (the same charges with prepaid commitments — AWS Reserved Instances, Savings Plans, Azure reservations — spread across the term they cover, rather than posted as a lump sum on the day they were bought). Only AWS, Azure, and any FOCUS-formatted source publish a distinct amortized figure; every other source reports amortized equal to billed, since there’s nothing to spread for a plain subscription or API charge.

Amortized data only exists from the date this feature shipped — it isn’t retroactively calculated for older charges, so cost from before that date is shown as billed-as-amortized. See Billed vs. amortized cost for the full mechanics, including why budgets and alerts don’t use this toggle.

Breaking down by tag

Selecting a tag key as the breakdown dimension groups cost by the tag values you’ve defined for it — for example, breaking spend down by team after mapping AWS accounts or GCP projects to team names. Tag breakdowns respect the same conservation rule as the underlying grain: the sum across all tag values for a day equals the sum for the grain that tag key is built on. See Virtual tagging for how rules, splits, and redistribution combine to produce that total.

The stat strip

Below the chart, a row of numbers gives context without a second request to the server — it’s computed from the same data already fetched for the chart:

• Total — summed cost for the selected date range and filters.
• Period-over-period delta — the percentage change against the immediately preceding period of the same length. A 30-day range compares against the prior 30 days, not the same days last month.
• One additional contextual number, specific to the current breakdown (for example, the top-costing dimension value).

The breakdown table’s Trend column uses the same period-over-period comparison, so a value you see there matches the stat strip’s delta calculation.

Saving and reloading a view

A view is a saved combination of date range, breakdown dimension, secondary breakdown, filters, and cost metric (billed or amortized). Save one with the Save view control above the chart, and give it a name. Saved views are stored per account, so any member of the account can reload one — they aren’t private to the user who created them.

To reload a saved view, open the view list and select it; every control on the page updates to match what was saved.

Display currency

Cost Explorer shows figures in a display currency you choose, independent of the currency each provider actually billed in. Changing the display currency converts every number on the page immediately, using the latest available exchange rate — no new sync or fetch is needed.

The order of precedence, most specific first:

1. A currency override set on the current chart.
2. Your own saved preference for this account.
3. The account’s default display currency.
4. The underlying USD base value, if none of the above is set.

Budgets, savings/commitment quotes shown in their native currency, plan pricing, and billing tier limits do not follow this setting — they’re pinned to their original currency or to USD.