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Glossary · Cost Visibility

What is AWS CUR (Cost and Usage Report)?

The most detailed AWS billing data export — line-item-level usage and cost, written hourly to an S3 bucket as Parquet or CSV.

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By HabileLabs

Definition

AWS CUR (Cost and Usage Report)

The AWS Cost and Usage Report (CUR) is the most granular billing data AWS makes available. Each row represents one usage line item — a single instance-hour, a single GB-month of S3 storage, a single S3 request — with the full attribution: account, service, resource ID, region, availability zone, tags, and the applied discounts.

AWS delivers the CUR to an S3 bucket you configure, updated hourly (or daily for the legacy versioned variant). Most cost-optimization tooling — including Refine — uses the CUR rather than the higher-level Cost Explorer API because the CUR is the only source with resource-ID granularity.

Why it matters for AWS cost

The CUR is the difference between "S3 cost us $12,000 last month" and "S3 bucket prod-logs-archive cost us $4,300 last month and grew 35% month-over-month." That resource-level visibility is required to answer most savings questions.

Without the CUR, you're limited to service-level aggregates from Cost Explorer, which is fine for high-level reports but blind to where the waste lives. Refine reads the CUR (when available) to surface resource-level recommendations.

Common gotchas
  • !The CUR is delivered to an S3 bucket you own — and that bucket itself accrues cost. Lifecycle the older months.
  • !Versioned CUR (legacy) vs CUR 2.0 (Data Exports): if you set up cost tooling in 2024+, prefer 2.0.
  • !The first CUR delivery lags 24 hours after enabling it; budget for that in onboarding flows.

Related

Cost Visibility

Cost Allocation Tag

A key-value AWS tag that has been activated for cost reporting — once active, it appears as a column in the Cost and Usage Report and Cost Explorer.

Cost Visibility

Cost Anomaly

A statistically significant unexpected spike or drop in AWS cost for a given service / account / region, relative to its recent baseline.

How Refine helps

Cost Optimization

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Refine is built and supported by HabileLabs, an AWS Advanced Tier Services Partner.

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