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I have a question about the following hypothetical situation:

  1. I have a company that has multiple customers. My company has multiple customers, each with various projects associated and using various AWS services (EC2, Textract, etc.)
  2. I want to know exactly how much I have to bill my customers for the AWS services their projects use.

Solutions that I have considered, but are not versatile enough:

  1. Cost Allocation Tags - this does not work because I cannot track the costs incurred by Textract (e.g. even if I create a separate IAM User for each customer, the billing dashboard will not track which IAM user generated which Textract costs). CloudWatch and writing a script to parse all calls to an API and the IAM User that generated them and then estimating cost isn't a solution either, I need actual hard data from an AWS bill.
  2. Organizations - This does not seem like it would be a solution either, since the FAQ says that the bill will not reflect the Organizational Units I define (https://aws.amazon.com/organizations/faqs/#Billing ).

Is the only option I have available to create completely separate AWS accounts for each of my customers, in order to separately track the costs they incur?

Adrian Ghiuta
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    I believe that you can still see the cost per account (https://docs.aws.amazon.com/awsaccountbilling/latest/aboutv2/consolidated-billing.html). I agree that the link 2 reference is very confusing and might mean that you cant ser hierarchial rollups of billing (i.e. should you have several levels of account nesting). So orgs is probably your best bet. They are free so you could give it a go! – dpwr Dec 21 '20 at 23:32

1 Answers1

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You would definitely use AWS Organizations for this - combined with separate AWS accounts, possibly in the clients name, but most importantly billed to you.

For each AWS account linked to your Organization, you will get a separate breakdown of their bill, as well as a total bill for your parent account.

You can also apply reserved instances as well as Savings Plans to your parent account and they will be applied to resources across your sub accounts. It is up to you how to distribute the savings (if at all) to your customers. The same applies to free tiers for Lambda and the like.

jdog
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  • BTW, even the smallest amounts of other people's accounts will cause AWS to assign Solution Architects to you that help you improve your set up free of charge – jdog Dec 21 '20 at 23:56