# Billing, pricing and support plans Pricing models, Free Tier, Budgets, Cost Explorer, Organizations and consolidated billing, plus the four AWS Support plans and what each one buys. Foundational notes for **AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C02)**. Read them in order the first time through, then use them as a revision sweep before you book. **14 study points.** Everything here is exam-oriented: each point is a fact or a distinction that CLF-C02 items are built on. Test yourself against the [practice exam](/aws/practice-exam/) once you can explain a section without re-reading it. ## Billing & Support By default, AWS accounts have a soft limit of 20 EC2 instances per Region. A soft limit means you can request an increase by contacting AWS Support. Understanding service limits is important because hitting them unexpectedly can prevent you from launching new resources during critical moments. AWS Trusted Advisor includes a Service Limits check that warns you when you're approaching these thresholds, giving you time to request an increase before you hit the ceiling. AWS support plans come in four tiers: Basic, Developer, Business, and Enterprise. The Basic plan is free and includes access to documentation, whitepapers, and Trusted Advisor core checks. The Developer plan adds email support during business hours and is suitable for testing and development environments. The Business plan provides 24/7 phone and chat support, full Trusted Advisor checks, and is recommended for production workloads. The Enterprise plan adds a Technical Account Manager (TAM) and Concierge support for billing inquiries. The AWS Concierge service is available exclusively to Enterprise support plan customers and specializes in billing and account management questions. If you have a complex billing inquiry, such as understanding your consolidated bill across multiple accounts or optimizing your Reserved Instance portfolio, the Concierge team provides personalized assistance. This is different from technical support; Concierge focuses specifically on the financial and administrative aspects of your AWS relationship. A Technical Account Manager (TAM) is a dedicated AWS expert assigned to Enterprise support plan customers. Your TAM proactively monitors your environment, helps you plan architecture reviews, coordinates access to AWS subject matter experts, and assists during operational events. Having a TAM is like having an AWS insider on your team who understands your specific business needs and ensures you're getting the most out of AWS services. AWS pricing is based on three fundamental charges: compute (how long your servers run), storage (how much data you store), and data transfer out (how much data leaves AWS). Importantly, data transfer into AWS is free. This means uploading terabytes of data to S3 costs nothing in transfer fees, but downloading that data or serving it to users will incur charges. Understanding this model helps you predict costs and avoid surprises on your monthly bill. Reserved Instances (RIs) offer significant discounts (up to 72%) compared to On-Demand pricing in exchange for a one-year or three-year commitment. There are three payment options: No Upfront (NURI), which spreads payments monthly; Partial Upfront (PURI), which offers a bigger discount; and All Upfront (AURI), which offers the largest discount. Partial Upfront is generally considered the most cost-effective balance between savings and cash flow flexibility for most organizations. AWS Cost Explorer is a free tool that lets you visualize, understand, and manage your AWS costs and usage over time. It provides data for up to 13 months, allowing you to analyze spending trends, identify cost drivers, and forecast future expenses. For example, you can see that your EC2 costs doubled last month because of an Auto Scaling misconfiguration, or predict what your bill will look like next quarter based on current usage patterns. Consolidated Billing is a feature of AWS Organizations that lets you combine the billing from multiple AWS accounts into a single payment method. This is useful for companies with separate accounts for development, staging, and production, or for organizations managing accounts for different business units. A key benefit is volume discounts: the combined usage across all accounts may qualify for lower per-unit pricing that individual accounts wouldn't reach on their own. The 24/7 phone and chat support channel is available starting at the Business support plan level. Both Business and Enterprise plans offer unlimited support cases with unlimited contacts on the customer side. The Developer plan limits you to one primary contact and email-only support during business hours. For production workloads where downtime costs real money, the Business plan is the minimum recommended tier because it guarantees a one-hour response time for production system impairment. Resource Groups and Tags are essential for organizing and managing your AWS resources. Tags are key-value pairs (like "Environment: Production" or "Team: Marketing") that you attach to resources. Resource Groups let you view and manage collections of resources that share the same tags. This is critical for cost allocation because you can use tags to track spending by project, team, or environment. Without a consistent tagging strategy, it becomes very difficult to understand where your money is going. AWS Trusted Advisor is not just a security tool; its Cost Optimization checks can save you significant money. It identifies idle EC2 instances, underutilized EBS volumes, unassociated Elastic IP addresses, and Reserved Instances that aren't being fully used. For example, Trusted Advisor might find that you're paying for a large EC2 instance that averages only 5% CPU utilization and recommend downsizing to a smaller, cheaper instance type. EC2 offers detailed monitoring at one-minute intervals for a fixed monthly rate per instance, compared to the default basic monitoring at five-minute intervals which is free. Detailed monitoring is valuable when you need more precise metrics for Auto Scaling decisions or performance troubleshooting. For example, if your application is sensitive to brief traffic spikes, five-minute averages might smooth out important signals that one-minute data would catch. AWS Budgets lets you set custom cost and usage budgets that alert you when you exceed or are forecasted to exceed your thresholds. Unlike Cost Explorer, which is primarily for analysis, Budgets is designed for proactive notification. You can set up alerts to notify you via email or SNS when actual or forecasted costs exceed 80%, 90%, or 100% of your budget. This is an essential guardrail for teams that need to stay within a specific spending limit. The AWS Free Tier provides three types of offers: services that are always free (like Lambda's first million requests per month), services that are free for 12 months after account creation (like 750 hours of EC2 t2.micro per month), and short-term trial offers. Understanding the Free Tier is important for learning and experimentation because it lets you explore AWS services without incurring costs, as long as you stay within the specified limits. --- ## Where to go next - Back to the [AWS Cloud Practitioner overview](/aws/cloud-practitioner/). - Look up any service you could not name in the [AWS services glossary](/aws/services-glossary/). - Sit the [80-item practice exam](/aws/practice-exam/) once two or three note pages are solid.