15 Pricing Models and Billing Tools · AWS Cloud Practitioner

In this chapter you will learn how AWS charges for compute, storage, and data transfer; how to choose among EC2 pricing models such as On-Demand, Savings Plans, Reserved Instances, Spot Instances, and Dedicated Hosts; how Lambda, S3, and RDS are priced; what the AWS Free Tier offers in 2026; and which billing tools to use for estimating, analyzing, alerting on, and reporting costs, including consolidated billing with AWS Organizations. This chapter covers Domain 4, Billing, Pricing, and Support (12% of the exam), especially Task Statement 4.1 (compare AWS pricing models) and Task Statement 4.2 (understand resources for billing, budget, and cost management).

15.1 How AWS charges

AWS pricing follows a few simple ideas that you saw back in the cloud value proposition: pay as you go, pay less when you commit, and pay less per unit as you use more. There are no upfront contracts required, and you stop paying when you stop using a resource (with the exception of commitments you chose to make).

Almost every AWS bill is built from three fundamental drivers:

Compute. You pay for the time your capacity runs, for example per second or per hour for EC2 instances, or per request and per millisecond of duration for Lambda.

Storage. You pay for the amount of data you store, usually per GB per month, plus sometimes for requests and data retrieval.

Data transfer. You pay to move data, mainly out of AWS.

The data transfer rules are a favorite on the exam:
Data movement Typical charge
Into AWS from the internet Free
Out of AWS to the internet Charged per GB (tiered)
Between Regions Charged
Between Availability Zones Usually charged (small fee)
Within one AZ using private IPs Usually free

Exam tip

“Inbound data transfer is free; outbound is charged” is the rule to remember. Serving content through Amazon CloudFront can lower outbound transfer costs and improve speed.

Some services are free in themselves, and you pay only for the resources they create or manage. Examples include AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), AWS Organizations, Amazon VPC itself (though NAT gateways and some other VPC features cost money), AWS CloudFormation (when used with AWS resources), Elastic Beanstalk, and EC2 Auto Scaling.

15.2 Amazon EC2 pricing models

EC2 offers several ways to buy the same compute capacity. The right choice depends on how predictable the workload is, how long it will run, and whether it can be interrupted.

On-Demand Instances

On-Demand is the default. You pay per second (Linux, with a 60-second minimum) or per hour for some operating systems, with no commitment and no upfront payment. It is the most flexible and the most expensive per hour. Use it for short-term, unpredictable, or spiky workloads, for testing, and for applications you are trying for the first time.

Savings Plans

Savings Plans give you a lower price in exchange for committing to a consistent amount of compute spend, measured in dollars per hour, for a 1-year or 3-year term. Any usage above the commitment is billed at On-Demand rates. There are two main kinds for compute:

Compute Savings Plans are the most flexible. The discount applies automatically to EC2 usage in any instance family, size, Region, operating system, or tenancy, and also to AWS Fargate and AWS Lambda. Savings reach up to about 66% compared with On-Demand.

EC2 Instance Savings Plans give a bigger discount (up to about 72%) but lock you to one instance family in one Region (for example, M7 in Ohio). You can still change size, operating system, and tenancy within that family. AWS also offers Savings Plans for some other services, such as Amazon SageMaker AI. For new commitments, AWS generally recommends Savings Plans over Reserved Instances because they are simpler and more flexible.

Reserved Instances

Reserved Instances (RIs) are the older commitment model. You commit to a specific instance configuration (instance type, Region, platform, and tenancy) for 1 or 3 years. An RI is not a separate server; it is a billing discount applied to matching running instances.

Standard RIs offer the largest discount (up to about 72%). You can change some attributes, such as Availability Zone or size within a family, but not the instance family. Unused Standard RIs can be sold on the Reserved Instance Marketplace.

Convertible RIs offer a smaller discount but let you exchange them for RIs with different attributes, including a different instance family or operating system.

RIs can be Regional (the discount floats across AZs in the Region) or zonal (tied to one AZ, which also reserves capacity there). Reserved pricing also exists for other services, such as Amazon RDS, Amazon ElastiCache, Amazon Redshift, and Amazon OpenSearch Service.

Payment options

Both Savings Plans and RIs offer three payment options. The more you pay upfront, the bigger the discount:

1. All Upfront: pay the whole term at once; largest discount.
2. Partial Upfront: pay part now and the rest monthly.
3. No Upfront: pay monthly; smallest discount, but still cheaper than On-Demand.

A 3-year term always earns a bigger discount than a 1-year term.

Spot Instances

Spot Instances use spare EC2 capacity at discounts of up to 90% off On-Demand. The catch: AWS can reclaim the instance when it needs the capacity back, giving you a two-minute warning. Spot is perfect for workloads that are flexible and fault tolerant: batch processing, big data analysis, image rendering, CI/CD test jobs, and stateless web servers behind a load balancer. It is a poor choice for databases or anything that must not be interrupted.

Dedicated Hosts and Dedicated Instances

By default, your instances run on hardware that may be shared with other AWS customers (still fully isolated by the hypervisor). Two options give you single-tenant hardware:

Dedicated Hosts give you an entire physical server for your use. You can see the server’s sockets and physical cores, which matters for bring-your-own-license (BYOL) software licensed per socket or per core (for example, some Windows Server, SQL Server, or Oracle licenses), and for strict compliance rules. It is the most expensive option. Dedicated Instances run on hardware dedicated to your account, but you do not control or see the underlying physical server, and AWS may move instances between hosts.

Common trap

If a question mentions server-bound software licenses, per-socket or per-core licensing, or visibility into physical cores, the answer is Dedicated Hosts, not Dedicated Instances.

On-Demand Capacity Reservations

An On-Demand Capacity Reservation reserves EC2 capacity in a specific Availability Zone for as long as you need, with no term commitment. You pay the On-Demand rate whether or not you run instances in it. It gives no discount by itself, but you can combine it with Savings Plans or Regional RIs to get both capacity assurance and lower prices. Use it for events where you must be sure capacity exists, such as a planned launch or disaster recovery.

Figure 15.1: EC2 pricing models arranged by discount and flexibility. Larger discounts usually require more commitment or less control. Which EC2 pricing model fits the workload?

Need per-core/socket licensing or

a physical server of your own?

Dedicated Hosts
Yes
No
Can the work be interrupted and

restarted (fault tolerant, flexible)?

Spot Instances
Yes
No
Is usage steady and expected to

last 1 year or more?

Yes

Will family, Region, or service change?

specific AZ for a period?

On-Demand Capacity Reservation
Yes
No
On-Demand Instances

Real fleets often mix models: commitments for the baseline, On-Demand and Spot for peaks.

Figure 15.2: A decision tree for matching a workload to an EC2 pricing model.

Workload Best model
Steady 24/7 web app for 3 years Savings Plans or RIs
Two-week test project On-Demand
Overnight batch jobs that can restart Spot
Per-core licensed software Dedicated Hosts
Guaranteed capacity in one AZ Capacity Reservation

15.3 Pricing for Lambda, S3, and RDS

AWS Lambda

Lambda charges for two things: the number of requests (invocations) and the duration of each run, measured in milliseconds and multiplied by the memory you allocated (expressed as GB-seconds). There is no charge when your code is not running. Lambda’s free usage includes 1 million requests and 400,000 GB-seconds of compute each month. Compute Savings Plans can also lower Lambda costs.

Amazon S3

S3 pricing depends on:

Storage per GB per month, which varies by storage class (Standard costs the most per GB; Glacier Deep Archive costs the least).

Requests (such as PUT, COPY, and GET) and data retrieval fees for infrequent-access and archive classes. Data transfer out of the Region (data in is free).

Optional management features, such as S3 Replication, inventory, and analytics.

Choosing the right storage class, or letting S3 Intelligent-Tiering move objects automatically, is the biggest S3 cost lever.

Amazon RDS

RDS charges for:

Database instance hours, based on the instance class and the engine (commercial engines with licenses included cost more).

Deployment option: a Multi-AZ deployment costs more than Single-AZ because AWS runs a standby.

Storage per GB per month and, for some storage types, provisioned IOPS.

Backup storage beyond the free amount equal to your database storage, and data transfer out.

Reserved DB instances lower the cost of steady databases. Amazon Aurora Serverless and other serverless options charge based on capacity actually used.

15.4 The AWS Free Tier

The AWS Free Tier changed for new accounts in 2025. Accounts created on or after July 15, 2025 choose between a free plan and a paid plan. The free plan gives new customers up to 200 USD in AWS credits: 100 USD at sign-up plus up to another 100 USD for completing introductory activities in services such as EC2, RDS, Lambda, Amazon Bedrock, and AWS Budgets. The free plan lasts up to 6 months or until the credits run out, whichever comes first; you can upgrade to a paid plan to keep going. The free plan also blocks some expensive services so that beginners do not get surprise bills.

Always Free offers continue for all accounts. Examples include Lambda’s monthly free requests and compute, a set amount of DynamoDB storage and capacity, and a number of SNS publishes and CloudWatch metrics each month.

Good to know

Exam questions and older study material may still describe the earlier three-way model: Always Free (never expires), 12 Months Free (for example, a small EC2 instance for 750 hours per month during the first year), and Trials (short free trials of specific services). Know these three names, and understand that newer accounts receive credits instead of the 12-month offers.

15.5 Billing and cost management tools

All of the following tools live in the AWS Billing and Cost Management console. Here you see your current bill and charges by service, download invoices, manage payment methods, and open the cost tools. By default only the root user can see billing; you can turn on IAM access to billing information so that finance team members with the right IAM permissions can use it.

AWS Pricing Calculator: estimate the future

The AWS Pricing Calculator is a free web tool for estimating the cost of an architecture before you build it. You add services, enter details such as instance types, storage, and data transfer, and get monthly and annual estimates you can share or export. It is the answer when a question asks how to estimate costs for a planned migration or a new workload. You do not need an AWS account to use it.

AWS Cost Explorer: analyze the past and forecast

AWS Cost Explorer visualizes your historical costs and usage in charts and lets you filter and group them by service, account, Region, tag, and more. You can see trends over months, find what is driving costs, and get a forecast of future spending based on past use. Cost Explorer also offers Savings Plans and RI purchase recommendations and utilization and coverage reports, plus rightsizing recommendations for EC2.

Cloud console | Billing and Cost Management > Cost Explorer
Cost and usage: monthly, grouped by Service
Date: last 6 months v Granularity: Monthly Group by: Service v Filter: Tag v

Usd

Figure 15.3: Cost Explorer shows monthly costs grouped by service, with a forecast for the coming months. (Illustration, not an actual AWS screenshot.)

AWS Budgets: alert before it is too late

AWS Budgets lets you set custom budgets and receive alerts when actual or forecasted costs or usage exceed a threshold. Budget types include:

Cost budgets (for example, 500 USD per month).

Usage budgets (for example, hours of a certain instance type).

Savings Plans and RI budgets to track utilization and coverage.

Alerts go to email addresses or an SNS topic. Budget actions can respond automatically, for example by applying a restrictive IAM policy or stopping EC2 or RDS instances when a budget is exceeded.

Hands-on lab

Hands-on: create a monthly cost budget

1. Open the Billing and Cost Management console and choose Budgets, then Create budget.
2. Choose Customize (advanced) and the budget type Cost budget.
3. Name the budget (for example, monthly-limit ), set the period to Monthly, and choose a Fixed amount of 50 USD.
4. Leave the scope as All AWS services, or filter by a tag or account.
5. Add an alert threshold of 80% of the budgeted amount, based on Actual costs, and add your email address.
6. Add a second threshold of 100% based on Forecasted costs.
7. Review and choose Create budget. You will receive emails as spending crosses each threshold.

50.00 Scope: All AWS services

Alert thresholds
Alert 1: 80% of budget, Actual Email
Alert 2: 100% of budget, Forecasted Email + SNS
Optional: attach a budget action (apply IAM policy, stop EC2/RDS)
Cancel Create budget

Figure 15.4: Creating a cost budget with actual and forecasted alert thresholds. (Illustration, not an actual AWS screenshot.) AWS Cost Anomaly Detection: catch the unusual

AWS Cost Anomaly Detection uses machine learning to learn your normal spending pattern and alerts you when spending is unusual, such as a sudden spike caused by a misconfigured resource or leaked access keys. Unlike a budget, you do not need to set a fixed threshold. Alerts can be immediate or summarized daily or weekly, and the tool identifies the likely root cause (service, account, Region, or usage type).

Cost and Usage Report and Data Exports: the full detail

The AWS Cost and Usage Report (CUR) is the most detailed billing data AWS provides: line items for every resource, often by the hour, including tags, pricing, and discounts. It is delivered to an S3 bucket, where you can analyze it with Amazon Athena, Amazon QuickSight, or other tools. AWS now manages this through Data Exports, which creates CUR exports (including the newer CUR 2.0 format) and other exports. Choose CUR when a question asks for the most comprehensive or most granular cost data.

Cost allocation tags

Tags are key-value labels on resources, such as Project=Phoenix or CostCenter=1234 . To see costs by tag in billing tools, you must activate them as cost allocation tags in the Billing console. There are two kinds: AWS-generated tags (such as aws:createdBy ) and user-defined tags. Once activated, they appear in Cost Explorer, Budgets, and the Cost and Usage Report, so you can show each department or project its own spending.

Figure 15.5: Choosing the right billing tool: estimate the future, analyze the past, get alerts, or dig into the detail.

Question asks to… Tool
Estimate cost before building Pricing Calculator
Visualize past spending, forecast Cost Explorer
Alert when cost passesalimit AWS Budgets
Spot unusual spend with ML Cost Anomaly Detection
Most detailed line-item data Costand Usage Report
Track costs by project Costallocation tags

15.6 Multiple accounts: Organizations and consolidated billing

AWS Organizations (covered in more detail in the security chapters (Chapters 5 to 7)) groups many AWS accounts under one management account. It is free to use. One of its key features is consolidated billing: One bill. The management account receives a single bill and one payment method for all member accounts, while you can still see each account’s charges.

Volume discounts. Usage is combined across accounts for tiered pricing. For example, S3 storage and data transfer from all accounts add up, so you reach cheaper tiers sooner.

Shared discounts. By default, Reserved Instance and Savings Plans discounts purchased in one account can apply to matching usage in other accounts in the organization.

1. One bill

Single payment method,
per-account detail still
visible

2. Volume tiers

3 x 30 TB priced as 90 TB,
reaching cheaper per-GB
tiers sooner

3. Shared discounts

Figure 15.6: Consolidated billing combines usage from member accounts into one bill, reaching cheaper volume tiers and sharing commitment discounts.

Real-world example

Real-world scenario: A company has three accounts, each storing 30 TB in S3. Billed separately, each account pays the first-tier price for all its data. With consolidated billing, the combined 90 TB is priced together, so the portion beyond the first tier earns a lower rate per GB. The company saves money with no change to its applications. AWS Billing Conductor is for organizations that need to present costs differently from the actual AWS bill, such as resellers, AWS Partners, or large enterprises doing showback and chargeback. It lets you group accounts into billing groups and apply custom pricing rules and margins, then produce a customized “pro forma” view of costs for each group. It does not change what you pay AWS.

15.7 Putting it together: a cost-aware design

Consider a company launching an online learning platform. Its web servers run all day, every day, at a steady baseline, with extra traffic on weekday evenings. Every night it transcodes uploaded lecture videos, and the jobs can safely restart if interrupted. Its database must be highly available.

A cost-aware design mixes pricing models instead of choosing just one:

The baseline web capacity is covered by a Compute Savings Plan, because the company expects to move some services to containers on Fargate later.

The evening peaks are handled by EC2 Auto Scaling with On-Demand instances, which are added only when needed.

The nightly transcoding runs on Spot Instances, saving up to 90% on that work.

The database uses an Amazon RDS Multi-AZ deployment with a reserved DB instance for the steady load. Course videos are delivered through CloudFront, which reduces data transfer out from the origin and speeds up playback.

Before launch, the team prices this design in the Pricing Calculator. After launch, it tags every resource with Project and Environment , activates those tags as cost allocation tags, and creates an AWS Budget with forecast alerts. Cost Anomaly Detection watches for surprises, and each month the team reviews Cost Explorer and its Savings Plans utilization reports to decide whether to adjust the commitment. This cycle of estimating, committing, monitoring, and adjusting is exactly what the Cost Optimization pillar of the Well-Architected Framework recommends.

Chapter 15 summary

AWS pricing is pay as you go, with lower prices for commitment and for higher volume; compute, storage, and data transfer drive most costs.

Data transfer into AWS is free; data transfer out to the internet and between Regions is charged. On-Demand gives flexibility; Savings Plans (Compute or EC2 Instance) and Reserved Instances (Standard or Convertible) give up to about 72% off for 1- or 3-year commitments, with All, Partial, or No Upfront payment options.

Spot Instances give up to 90% off but can be interrupted with a two-minute warning; use them for fault-tolerant work.

Dedicated Hosts give a whole physical server for per-core or per-socket licenses; Dedicated Instances give single-tenant hardware without host visibility; Capacity Reservations guarantee capacity without a discount. Lambda charges per request and duration; S3 by storage class, requests, and transfer; RDS by instance hours, deployment option, storage, and backups.

New accounts since July 15, 2025 get a free plan with up to 200 USD in credits for up to 6 months; Always Free offers continue.

Pricing Calculator estimates, Cost Explorer analyzes and forecasts, Budgets alerts, Cost Anomaly Detection finds unusual spend, and the Cost and Usage Report gives full detail.

Organizations consolidated billing gives one bill, combined volume discounts, and shared RI and Savings Plans benefits; Billing Conductor supports custom showback and chargeback.

Key terms

On-Demand Instance

EC2 capacity billed per second or hour with no commitment.

Savings Plan

A 1- or 3-year commitment to a dollar-per-hour amount of compute usage in exchange for lower prices.

Reserved Instance

A 1- or 3-year billing discount for a specific instance configuration; Standard or Convertible.

Spot Instance

Spare EC2 capacity at a deep discount that AWS can reclaim with a two-minute warning.

Dedicated Host

A physical server fully dedicated to one customer, with visibility into sockets and cores for licensing.

Consolidated billing

An AWS Organizations feature that combines all member accounts into one bill with shared volume and commitment discounts.

Cost allocation tag

An activated resource tag used to group and report costs in billing tools.

Cost and Usage Report

The most detailed AWS billing dataset, delivered to Amazon S3.

Practice questions

1. A company is running a new application whose traffic is unpredictable and that may be shut down after a month. Which EC2 pricing model is most appropriate?

A. Standard Reserved Instances B. On-Demand Instances
C. Dedicated Hosts D. EC2 Instance Savings Plans

2. A company runs a steady workload on EC2 today, but expects to move parts of it to AWS Fargate and Lambda and to change Regions during the next three years. Which option provides savings with the most flexibility?

A. Standard Reserved Instances B. EC2 Instance Savings Plans
C. Compute Savings Plans D. Spot Instances

3. A media company renders video frames overnight. Jobs can be stopped and restarted without problem. Which pricing model offers the lowest cost?

A. On-Demand Instances B. Spot Instances
C. Dedicated Instances D. Convertible Reserved Instances

4. A company wants to use its existing server-bound software licenses, which are billed per physical CPU core, on AWS. Which option should it choose?

A. Dedicated Instances B. Dedicated Hosts
C. Spot Instances D. On-Demand Capacity Reservations

5. Which payment option for a 3-year Reserved Instance provides the greatest discount?

A. No Upfront B. Partial Upfront
C. All Upfront D. Monthly On-Demand

6. A company must be certain that EC2 capacity will be available in a specific Availability Zone during a product launch next week, without a long-term commitment. What should it use?

A. On-Demand Capacity Reservation B. Spot Instances
C. 1-year Standard Reserved Instance D. Compute Savings Plan

7. Which data transfer is generally free of charge on AWS?

A. Data transferred from Amazon S3 to the internet B. Data transferred into AWS from the internet
C. Data transferred between two AWS Regions D. Data transferred out through a NAT gateway

8. A company wants a Reserved Instance that it can later exchange for a different instance family as its needs change. Which type should it buy?

A. Standard Reserved Instance B. Convertible Reserved Instance
C. Zonal Standard Reserved Instance D. Spot Block

9. Which factors determine the cost of running an AWS Lambda function? (Choose two.)

A. Number of requests B. Number of Availability Zones used
C. Duration multiplied by allocated memory D. Number of IAM users in the account
E. Size of the VPC CIDR range

10. A solutions architect must estimate the monthly cost of a planned three-tier application before anything is deployed. Which tool should be used?

A. AWS Cost Explorer B. AWS Pricing Calculator
C. AWS Cost and Usage Report D. AWS Budgets

11. A finance manager wants to see how the company’s spending on each service has changed over the last six months and get a forecast for next month. Which tool fits best?

A. AWS Cost Explorer B. AWS Pricing Calculator
C. AWS Trusted Advisor D. AWS Billing Conductor

12. A startup wants to receive an email when its forecasted monthly AWS spending exceeds 1,000 USD. Which service should it use?

A. AWS Cost Explorer B. AWS Budgets
C. AWS CloudTrail D. AWS Organizations

13. A company wants to be alerted when spending suddenly deviates from its normal pattern, without defining fixed thresholds. Which service provides this using machine learning?

A. AWS Budgets B. AWS Cost Anomaly Detection
C. AWS Compute Optimizer D. Amazon Macie

14. A data team needs the most granular, line-item billing data, including resource IDs and tags, to load into Amazon Athena for custom analysis. What should it use?

A. AWS Cost and Usage Report B. AWS Pricing Calculator
C. AWS Health Dashboard D. Cost Explorer default reports

15. A company wants to report AWS costs by department. Each resource already has a Department tag, but the tag does not appear in billing reports. What must be done?

A. Enable AWS CloudTrail B. Activate the tag as a cost allocation tag in the Billing console
C. Create a new AWS account per department D. Purchase a Business Support plan

16. A company with 12 AWS accounts wants one monthly bill and to benefit from combined usage for volume pricing. Which features or services provide this? (Choose two.)

A. Consolidated billing B. AWS Organizations
C. AWS Cost Explorer forecasts D. Dedicated Hosts
E. AWS Budgets actions

17. An AWS Partner resells AWS to its customers and needs to show each customer a bill with its own custom rates and margins. Which service supports this?

A. AWS Billing Conductor B. AWS Pricing Calculator
C. AWS Marketplace D. AWS Cost Anomaly Detection

18. A person creates a new AWS account in 2026 and chooses the free plan. What do they receive?

A. Unlimited free use of all services for 12 months B. AWS credits of up to 200 USD, usable for up to 6 months, plus Always Free offers
C. A free Business Support plan for one year D. A permanent 50% discount on EC2

Answers and explanations

1. B. On-Demand has no commitment and suits short-term, unpredictable workloads. Reserved Instances and Savings Plans require 1- or 3-year commitments, and Dedicated Hosts are costly and unnecessary here.
2. C. Compute Savings Plans apply across instance families, Regions, Fargate, and Lambda. EC2 Instance Savings Plans and Standard RIs are tied to an instance family and Region, and Spot is not suitable for steady work.
3. B. Spot offers up to 90% off and suits interruptible jobs like rendering. On-Demand and Dedicated Instances cost more, and RIs are for steady usage.
4. B. Dedicated Hosts give visibility into physical sockets and cores for BYOL licensing. Dedicated Instances provide single-tenant hardware but do not expose the host’s cores.
5. C. All Upfront earns the largest discount. No Upfront and Partial Upfront save less, and On-Demand has no discount at all.
6. A. Capacity Reservations guarantee capacity in a specific AZ with no term commitment. Spot can be reclaimed, and RIs and Savings Plans require 1- or 3-year terms.
7. B. Inbound data transfer from the internet is free. Data out to the internet, between Regions, and through NAT gateways is charged.
8. B. Convertible RIs can be exchanged for different attributes, including instance family. Standard RIs cannot change family.
9. A, C. Lambda charges per request and for duration based on allocated memory (GB-seconds). The other options do not affect Lambda pricing.
10. B. The Pricing Calculator estimates costs for planned architectures. Cost Explorer and the Cost and Usage Report analyze actual past usage, so they cannot price something not yet built.
11. A. Cost Explorer visualizes historical costs and provides forecasts. The Pricing Calculator estimates new designs, and Billing Conductor creates custom billing views.
12. B. AWS Budgets sends alerts based on actual or forecasted costs. Cost Explorer shows forecasts but is not the alerting tool.
13. B. Cost Anomaly Detection uses machine learning to spot unusual spending without fixed thresholds. Budgets requires you to set threshold amounts.
14. A. The Cost and Usage Report delivers the most detailed line-item data to S3 for tools such as Athena. Cost Explorer provides summarized views.
15. B. Tags must be activated as cost allocation tags before they appear in billing tools. CloudTrail records API calls and does not affect billing reports.
16. A, B. Consolidated billing, a feature of AWS Organizations, provides one bill and combined volume pricing. Budgets actions and Cost Explorer forecasts do not combine accounts’ bills.
17. A. Billing Conductor applies custom pricing rules to groups of accounts for showback, chargeback, and reselling. AWS Marketplace sells software, not custom bills.
18. B. Since July 15, 2025, the free plan provides up to 200 USD in credits for up to 6 months, and Always Free offers still apply. No plan gives unlimited free use or free Business Support.