[HiDavidDay]

I was looking at AWS Cost Explorer API, looks promising but don't know if it's granular enough.

after thinking about your comment on EC2, I think this tool could help smaller teams where you don't know who's doing what with the resources and you just need an upper limit of your monthly/daily spend.

about the last point, yes it's very hard to figure out. Also I thought most people check out the pricing page before trying out any aws services, wouldn't that give an estimate of what they are getting into (i.e. RDS, API gateway) ?

But again I always forget about the data transfer charges so you might be right about this.

[solidasparagus]

I've used cost explorer enough to know that it lags meaningfully behind current costs, but you would probably have to do some measurements to know how much (I would guess several days). If you do that, remember that individual services (or even different components of a single service) might have different lag times. The cost explorer data seems pretty good though.

> I think this tool could help smaller teams where you don't know who's doing what with the resources and you just need an upper limit of your monthly/daily spend.

Yeah, definitely!

> But again I always forget about the data transfer charges

Yeah. AWS can have some pretty complex cost models since they charge based on the amount of resources you actually used - there are way more axes of cost than most people have time to think through.

If you end up building this, I suggest considering that many people will not want their resources automatically shut down, either because they want to serve the spike in traffic or because they are paranoid that there could be a mistake and have production infrastructure accidentally shut down. I would consider designing it so that users can choose to get a Slack message or something instead of having the resources shut down.