Must know
- Pricing principles: pay as you go, save when you commit, and pay less by using more.
- Main cost drivers: compute, storage, and data transfer out.
- Billing shows current charges; Budgets alerts; Cost Explorer analyzes; Pricing Calculator estimates.
- Organizations consolidates billing, allocation tags assign ownership, Compute Optimizer recommends sizes, and Trusted Advisor checks broader practices.
- Basic has no technical-case response SLA; Enterprise is identified by a designated TAM.
- Marketplace sells third-party products; APN connects customers with partners.
Common traps
- Support response time is an initial-response target, not a resolution guarantee.
- A VPC endpoint is not always free: gateway and interface endpoints use different pricing models.
- Pay as you go does not make idle resources, oversized capacity, logs, snapshots, or data transfer free.
Final review
Budgets alerts, Explorer analyzes, Calculator estimates, Organizations consolidates; Marketplace sells and APN connects.