Seeing amortized AWS costs

Yotascale costs include amortization of all one-time fees, including Reserve Instance (RI) purchases, taxes, support, and long-lived subscriptions. To help users who relied on the one-time cost toggle to understand what is in the interface now, we’ve created a quick explanation of the changes, below.

If you want to see cost that...

Matches your AWS bill

Select ‘cash.’ (To switch between cash and accrual, click on 

 in the upper right-hand corner of the screen) This version of your cost shows all one-time fees (including RI upfront fees) in the aggregate amount and on the date that you paid Amazon.

Matches value received

Select ‘accrual.’ This includes RI fees amortized and applied to instances that benefitted each hour, and shows other one-time fees amortized down to the day for the full-time period where the resource is used (e.g. ‘New Relic 1 year subscription’ would be broken down and show a small amount daily for the full year).

Frequently Asked Questions

• Do both ‘cash’ and ‘accrual’ show one-time costs?

Yes, the major difference is that the costs are fully amortized in the ‘accrual’ option, which aligns with how the business receives value from large purchases and reduces the spikiness of the cost graphs.

• Yotascale's 'accrual' cost does not match Amazon Cost Explorer's 'amortized' cost.  What is the difference?

There are three major differences - fees that Yotascale amortizes that Amazon does not, and how Yotascale amortizes RI fees to enable a clearer picture of usage-driven cost, and how each group costs, for example, EC2 costs in Yotascale equal EC2 + EC2-Other costs in Cost Explorer.

Amazon's Cost Explorer only amortizes RI upfront fees.  Yotascale's 'accrual' cost amortizes all long-term costs.  Examples of additional fees that we amortize include support fees, taxes, and marketplace subscriptions like a 1 year New Relic subscription.  All of these fees are amortized to the day - so a 1 year subscription would be amortized across all 365 days.

Amazon Cost Explorer amortizes RI fees to the month - so your total committed RI cost shows up on the first of the month as a spike and depletes throughout the month as resources benefit from the RI.  Yotascale amortizes RI fees for the current month to the day, which means you only see the cost for the current month if the day has happened and there is no spike on the first of the month.

Both of these Yotascale-specific amortization enhancements enable your organization to use the 'accrual' view of the cost to see the value your company is receiving from AWS, on the day the value is received.