Comparisons
AWS Provided Tools
AWS Cost Explorer
AWS Cost Explorer provides cost data of AWS services which can be sliced by account, region, and tags. These are useful when trying to get an overall picture of costs, but will not provide you an end-to-end picture, requiring a lot of work to find the resource and the attributing operation for the costs. Further, it doesn't give you resource id level details for resources (e.g. S3 buckets) and operation usage (e.g. number of GET/PUT Requests). Cloudshim lets you deep-dive to the most granular level of cost & usage data to help you gain full Cost Transparency on your resource usage.
AWS Cost Explorer Savings
AWS Cost Explorer covers savings for EC2 and Compute for databases. The savings are RIs. Cloudshim covers a broader range of savings (unused inventory, Savings plan, S3, etc.) built on your usage data.
Self-serve Dashboard
A popular alternative is to set up a dashboard (Quicksight, Grafana etc.) on your existing Cost & Usage reports. There are several drawbacks to this:
You will spend hours understanding the content of the Cost & Usage report and all the ETL required to bring relevant metrics. From our experience, understanding your resource usage is key to solving 90% of the problem.
It requires a lot of setup and maintenance, which hurts efficiency and developer velocity.
It doesnt cover any Resource Savings
It could get expensive
Vendor Solutions
Cloudshim was built precisely because there is no one suitable solution that provides granular level analysis and cost-effective savings for SMBs building on AWS.
Cost Management solutions
Most cost-effective solutions out there consume the Cost Explorer APIs to display your cost & savings data. The API is limited in data returned (Maximum 2 dimensions), doesn't contain ID level details and every metric request costs you $0.01 (Link).
The Enterprise grade solutions consume the same Cost & Usage reports that Cloudshim is built on. These offer similar level of analysis and savings but are generally costly (3-4X more).
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