The longer answer is that, although Amazon does provide many tools, as I'm sure anyone who has attempted to use them for cost analysis and/or forecasting has found, they are, at best, difficult (i.e. require a remarkable amount of human labor to extract the desired information, if that's even possible). At worst, one discovers that it's impossible to find out what one truly wants from the tool, even after exerting the effort, although it might be a close approximation. Amazon has little incentive to spend money improving a tool that would help their customers send them less revenue.
> The longer answer is that, although Amazon does provide many tools, as I'm sure anyone who has attempted to use them for cost analysis and/or forecasting has found, they are, at best, difficult (i.e. require a remarkable amount of human labor to extract the desired information, if that's even possible). At worst, one discovers that it's impossible to find out what one truly wants from the tool, even after exerting the effort, although it might be a close approximation. Amazon has little incentive to spend money improving a tool that would help their customers send them less revenue.
I completely agree.
I tried out that complicated as hell calculator, and found that for a lot of fields I was just inputting numbers, with no idea what I was doing.
I think the Cloud Formation price predictor thing is pretty useful for a Cloud Formation script. But I'm new to Cloud Formation and probably won't use it b/c it may be too complex for my needs and I don't know what I'm doing.
That's a great question! So for many people, Cost Explorer does a pretty darn good job at getting you the data you need. However, it takes some extra configuration to get the level of alerting you need. We're not recreating Cost Explorer. We'll automatically notify you of any weird irregularities in your daily spend on AWS on a daily basis.
AWS Trusted Advisor is a pretty awesome tool! However, it's only available to companies paying for Business or Enterprise level support (3-10% of your monthly bill).
This isn't a tool for everyone, but we hope that it provides enough value for some folks.
