Costs not showing in Cost Explorer

Question

My primary use of AWS is the Simple Email Service. I have been using it for a while as a simple email relay for small numbers of emails, no more than 10 a day. I am about to start using SES with an email marketing service though and want to be able to analyse the costs of each campaign sent. I sent one test campaign on the 9th of June, however, the costs of that campaign have not shown up in Cost Explorer. The campaign was sent using a sub AWS account of my Organization, but the costs aren't showing in the Cost Explorer of that account either. As the 9th was several days ago I would have thought it would show by now but I've not seen anything.

Can anyone shed any light on how long the costs take to show in here?

Thanks

Can anyone shed any light on how long the costs take to show in here?

Thanks

Answer

If costs are incurred, they can be confirmed the next day.  
If no costs have been incurred, they will not be displayed.  
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cost-management/latest/userguide/ce-enable.html  
> You can enable Cost Explorer for your account by opening Cost Explorer for the first time in the AWS Cost Management console. You can't enable Cost Explorer using the API. After you enable Cost Explorer, AWS prepares the data about your costs for the current month and the previous 12 months, and then calculates the forecast for the next 12 months. The current month's data is available for viewing in about 24 hours. The rest of your data takes a few days longer. Cost Explorer updates your cost data at least once every 24 hours.

How are your emails sent?  
Checking the following document, it says that up to 62,000 messages are free when sent from EC2.  
https://aws.amazon.com/ses/pricing/?nc1=h_ls

Answer

SES has a free tier every month of 62k messages outbound. Therefore, if you haven't sent more than 62k messages, you will not see a charge.

If you look at Cost Explorer and filter for the SES Service, and Group By the Dimension of "Usage Type" you should get a list of the usage types that you are using even if they have a cost of $0. If you want to see a specific Dimension graphed, you can filter for Usage Type and that Dimension (like messages) and you will see a lower graph appear that includes the Dimension. As long as the Usage Types in the filter have the same metric (Messages, GB-Hours, Bytes, etc etc) then the lower graph will appear. When multiple metrics are shown, then only the cost will be shown.

Additionally, you should also be able to see the number of messages sent in CloudWatch.

Answer

Hi there.

If you're accounts are less than 1 year old, then they might still be under the free tier which allows you to send up to 62,000 emails per month at no cost when sending emails from an EC2 instance.

If this is not the case, the cost of sending emails from other sources would be a flat $0.10 / 1000 emails + $0.12 for each GB of attachments you send. This should report in cost explorer within a few days but the data may take up to 10 days to show up.

I hope this helps.

Costs not showing in Cost Explorer

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