Cloud cost
Billed vs. effective vs. list vs. contracted cost
The four cost columns FOCUS defines for one charge: cash-basis, amortized, pre-discount, and negotiated-rate. This is why two dashboards can quote two numbers for the same month.
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Definition
BilledCost is the cash-basis number. It is what forms the basis for the invoice, with no spreading of upfront charges. EffectiveCost amortizes a prepaid purchase across every month it covers. So a three-year upfront commitment shows one huge BilledCost spike in month one. EffectiveCost stays flat in every month after.
ListCost is the pre-discount baseline. It is the list unit price times the quantity, with no discount of any kind. ContractedCost applies a negotiated rate, such as a private pricing agreement or a volume discount. It does not apply a commitment discount like a Reserved Instance. With no separately negotiated price, it defaults to ListCost.
Where it shows up
These four columns appear side by side in a FOCUS-formatted billing export. BilledCost and EffectiveCost are separate fields for the same charge. ListCost and ContractedCost show the pre-discount and negotiated-rate baselines. AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud each publish their own FOCUS export with all four populated.
What makes it expensive
Do not read BilledCost as the whole story. A three-year upfront payment lands entirely in one month's BilledCost. Every month it covers then reads as near zero, which looks free next to that spike. Check any month with an unusually large or small total against EffectiveCost before you draw a conclusion.
Related
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- Savings plan (SP)
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- Data egress
- Amortized, blended, and unblended cost
- Rightsizing
- Idle and orphaned resources
- Storage class
- Lifecycle policy
- Incremental snapshot
- Allocatable capacity
- Requests vs. limits
- Cluster idle
- Workload idle
- Bin packing
- Cost allocation tags
- Tag coverage
- Unallocated spend
- Showback vs. chargeback
- Unit economics
- RI/SP coverage and utilization
- Observability tax
- Metric cardinality
- High-water-mark billing
- Log ingest vs. index
- Snowflake credit
- Auto-suspend / resume minimum
- BigQuery slot
- Bytes scanned & partition pruning
- Time Travel & Fail-safe
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