CLOUD COSTS
Understanding AWS Cost Views: A Practical Guide for FinOps and Procurement
AWS cost reporting is often the difference between productive alignment and teams talking past each other. When engineering flags a $50k spike and finance dismisses it as "just an RI purchase," you are not looking at a cost problem, you are looking at a translation problem.
The root issue: AWS gives you three different ways to look at the same spend, and each view speaks to a different persona. Engineers, finance, and procurement can all be right, but if they are not aligned on which view they are using, it turns into noise instead of insight.
Unblended Costs: The Raw Feed
Unblended costs show you exactly what AWS charged, when they charged it. Think of it like your credit card statement: no smoothing, no adjustments, just the transactions.
CFOs are shifting focus from just cost cutting to maximizing cloud investment value, with tighter collaboration needed between finance, procurement, and engineering.
What you get:
Real-time charges by service and resource
The default view in Cost Explorer and invoices
Reserved Instance upfront fees as huge one-day spikes
Savings Plans as steady daily charges
Who needs this: Engineers tracking usage day by day live here. They want to know, "What did we actually get billed for yesterday?"
Where it goes wrong: For procurement and finance, this view can feel chaotic. A $100k RI purchase looks like overspend when it is actually a savings strategy. Even AWS anomaly detection will flag these purchases as “cost spikes,” which leads to unnecessary panic and wasted cycles.
Amortized Costs: The Accountant's View
Amortized costs spread those RI or Savings Plan charges over time, aligning expenses with how resources are actually consumed. Instead of a $100k spike, you see the cost distributed evenly.
What changes:
RI upfront fees smooth out into daily allocations
Costs align with resource consumption
Monthly trends become stable and easier to compare
Who needs this: Finance, FinOps, and procurement teams. This is the view that makes showback and chargeback possible. If you are allocating costs to business units or validating whether your commitments are aligned with demand, you need amortized data.
Why it matters: Procurement negotiating enterprise deals and finance building budgets cannot work off unblended chaos. Amortized costs give you consistency, which means you can plan and report with confidence.
Net Amortized: The Full Picture
Net amortized costs go one step further. They take amortized data and then layer in credits, volume discounts, and enterprise agreement savings.
What changes:
Discounts are fully accounted for
You see the true net cost impact on your business
Who needs this: Finance executives and procurement leaders validating ROI on commitments and EDP agreements. When the CFO asks "What did we really pay?", this is the dataset that ties cloud spend to financial statements.
The catch: Not every AWS tool supports net amortized costs. If your FinOps team is explaining anomalies from unblended data, but your finance team is reporting savings from net amortized data, you are not going to reconcile.
Where Teams Go Wrong
Misalignment happens because teams look at different cost views without realizing it:
An engineer sees unblended costs spike and raises alarms. Finance sees amortized data that looks flat. Both are correct, just in different languages.
A FinOps analyst uses amortized data to allocate spend, but engineering checks against unblended anomalies and questions the math.
Procurement validates savings off amortized costs while finance reports net amortized. The numbers don’t match because one includes discounts the other never sees.
Making It Work
Pick a primary view: Most organizations standardize on amortized costs for allocation and internal reporting. It balances operational and financial needs.
Educate engineers: Show them why RI purchases create unblended spikes. It only takes ten minutes of context to save hours of back-and-forth.
Reserve unblended: Use it for invoice reconciliation, anomaly detection, and real-time monitoring, not budgeting.
Use net amortized with intention: Save it for executive-level reporting and financial reconciliation, and make sure everyone knows which tools can and cannot display it.
The Reality
Unblended = what AWS charged you and when
Amortized = what you are spending consistently day to day
Net amortized = what you actually pay after discounts and credits
None of these are “wrong.” They just answer different questions. The key for procurement, finance, and engineering is knowing which question you are asking and making sure everyone else is asking the same one.
When your next cost review feels misaligned, start by checking which cost view each team is using. It is often the difference between miscommunication and strategic clarity.
NEWS
The Burn-Down Bulletin: More Things to Know
Key FinOps trends for CFOs to watch in 2025 – CFOs are shifting focus from just cost cutting to maximizing cloud investment value, with tighter collaboration needed between finance, procurement, and engineering.
FinOps Personas Decoded – Procurement Focus – A deep dive into the procurement persona in FinOps, covering how sourcing teams negotiate cloud deals, optimize commitments, and partner with FinOps to turn contracts into savings.
IBM’s Apptio AI tool targets finance and procurement – IBM/Apptio is rolling out an AI assistant to help finance and procurement leaders identify cost drivers, surface savings, and keep cloud budgets in check.
When cloud growth outpaces control, waste follows – Without early governance and visibility, cloud spend balloons into waste. Procurement and FinOps alignment is critical to rein in runaway costs.
WEEKLY MVP
Oleksii Pasichnyk
“FinOps is set of practices which uses the same data available to Engineering and Accounting. By merging it together we create presentation and storytelling which matters.”
That’s all for this week. See you next Tuesday!
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