Cloud cost
Billed vs. effective vs. list vs. contracted cost
The four cost columns FOCUS defines for the same charge: cash-basis, amortized, pre-discount, and negotiated-rate. That's why two dashboards can quote two different numbers for the same month.
Last updated
Definition
BilledCost is the cash-basis number: what forms the basis for the invoice, excluding any spreading of upfront charges. EffectiveCost amortizes a prepaid purchase across every month it covers instead of showing it all in the month it was paid, which is why a three-year upfront commitment shows one enormous BilledCost spike in month one and a flat EffectiveCost every month after.
ListCost is the pre-discount baseline: list unit price times quantity, with no discount of any kind applied. ContractedCost applies a negotiated rate (a private pricing agreement, a volume discount) but not a commitment discount like a Reserved Instance, so it defaults to ListCost whenever there's no separately negotiated price.
Where it shows up
These four columns appear side by side in a FOCUS-formatted billing export: BilledCost and EffectiveCost as separate fields for the same charge, plus ListCost and ContractedCost showing 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
Reading BilledCost as the whole story is where this goes wrong. A three-year upfront payment lands entirely in one month's BilledCost. Every month it actually covers then reads as near-zero, which looks free next to that one spike. Any month with an unusually large or small total deserves a second read against EffectiveCost before anyone draws a conclusion from either column.
Related
More in Cloud cost
- Committed use discount (CUD)
- Reserved instance (RI)
- Savings plan (SP)
- On-demand vs. spot instances
- 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
One flat price. Read-only access.
CostMon charges a flat rate, not a cut of what you spend or save. Access is read-only, so nothing you connect can be changed from our side.