Setting Up A Budget

It's inevitable that we will end up spending some amount of money in AWS. We will try to only use the free services, but there's nothing stopping us from accidentally setting up an expensive RDS instance and paying the price.

We can however, setup a budget alarm so that we get notified if we're spending more than we think we should.

step 1:

In the search bar, search for and select Billing and Cost Management

step 2:

In the Cost Monitor section, select "Setup Required" under Budgets Status

We are going to use a predefined template here. You could select "Zero spend budget" to be notified when any amount of money is spent on your account, but this isn't useful when we plan on spending a little bit of money.

We will be using some paid services so we will setup a "Monthly cost budget". You can input any amount here and AWS will notify you before you spend that amount. $5 is reasonable in the beginning so that you can use a few paid services and experiment more, but also be notified before you spend $5.

step 3:

Select Monthly cost budget

step 4:

Set the amount to $5, add your email address, and create the budget