Why Your Cloud Bill is Wrong: The Problems with AWS Cost Explorer for Kubernetes

AWS Cost Explorer (CE) is a great starting point for account-level visibility, but it was never designed for Kubernetes. Here are the top reasons CE fails platform teams and what to use instead.

1. No concept of pods or namespaces

CE groups spend by AWS service, linked account, or tag. It has no idea what a pod, namespace, or cluster is. That means:

• Multi-tenant clusters look like one giant EC2 line item.
• You cannot show engineers how much their deployments cost.
• Finance ends up emailing DevOps every month for a “custom breakdown.”

ClusterCost solves this by joining AWS billing data with Kubernetes metadata (from the API server) so every dollar has a workload owner.

2. Delayed data

CE refreshes once or twice a day. When a pod explodes spend, you find out tomorrow. ClusterCost streams metrics in near real time, so anomalies trigger within minutes.

3. No spot vs. on-demand mix

CE shows spot discounts but not which workloads benefited. ClusterCost tracks pods per node group, so you can report “team growth saved $8.3k last week by running on spot.”

4. Shared infrastructure is invisible

CE cannot attribute NAT, load balancers, or logging to the services that need them. ClusterCost lets you define policies—by request rate, bytes, or fixed ratios—so shared costs become transparent.

5. No automation hooks

CE exports CSVs, but it does not generate right-sizing recommendations or open Jira issues. ClusterCost bakes FinOps workflows into the product:

• Right-sizing pods and nodes.
• Idle environment detection.
• Budget alerts tied to namespaces or teams.

What to do instead

1. Keep CE for high-level rollups and finance reconciliation.
2. Deploy ClusterCost for workload-level visibility and automation.
3. Sync both tools through your data warehouse so executives get a single source of truth.

When you combine AWS billing data with Kubernetes awareness, the cloud bill finally matches the reality engineers see every day.***