# Understanding unexpected charges



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| For questions about your AWS bills or to appeal your charges, contact Support to address your inquiries immediately. To get help, see [Getting help with your bills and payments](billing-get-answers.md). To understand your bills page contents, see [Using the Bills page to understand your monthly charges and invoice](getting-viewing-bill.md#invoice). | 

**Note**  
If your AWS organization uses billing transfer, contact the bill transfer account owner first because they control your cost data and receive your AWS invoices. To find the bill transfer account information, go to the **billing transfer** page, **Outbound billing** tab.

Here are examples to help you avoid unexpected charges on your bill. This page lists specific features or behaviors within individual services from AWS that can sometimes result in unexpected charges, particularly if you unsubscribe from the service or close your account.

**Note**  
This is not an exhaustive list. For any questions for your specific use case, contact Support by following the process on [Getting help with your bills and payments](billing-get-answers.md).  
If you close your account or unsubscribe from a service, make sure that you take the appropriate steps for every AWS Region you've allocated AWS resources.

**Topics**
+ [

## Usage exceeds AWS Free Tier
](#checkexceedfree)
+ [

## Charges received after account closure
](#checkbillafterclosure)
+ [

## Charges incurred from resources in AWS Regions that are turned off
](#check-disabled-region)
+ [

## Charges incurred by services launched by other services
](#servicesnotfree)
+ [

## Charges incurred by Amazon EC2 instances
](#checkec2instances)
+ [

## Charges incurred by Amazon Elastic Block Store volumes and snapshots
](#checkebsvolumes)
+ [

## Charges incurred by Elastic IP addresses
](#checkelasticipaddresses)
+ [

## Charges incurred by storage services
](#servicestorage)
+ [

## Charges incurred for AWS Organizations that use billing transfer
](#billingtransfer-charges)
+ [

## Contacting Support
](#all-other-charges)

## Usage exceeds AWS Free Tier


Check if your services have expired your free tier usage. If you chose **Paid plan** for your AWS Free Tier, you are charged using pay-as-you go pricing after six months ends or when your credits are fully used. Your account is not closed, allowing for seamless, continuous usage of your AWS resources. For more information, see [Trying services using AWS Free Tier (before July 15, 2025)](billing-free-tier.md).

After you've identified the resources that are generating charges, you can continue to use the resources and manage your billing, terminate unused resources, or close your AWS account.
+ For information about managing your billing, see [What is AWS Billing and Cost Management?](billing-what-is.md) and [Getting set up with Billing](billing-getting-started.md).
+ For information about terminating resources, go to the resource documentation for that service. For example, if you have unused Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud instances, see [Terminate your instance](#checkec2instances).
+ For information about closing your AWS account, see [Close your account](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/accounts/latest/reference/manage-acct-closing.html) in the *AWS Account Management Reference Guide*.

**Note**  
When you use billing transfer, you can't view your Free Tier benefits in Cost Explorer, the **Bills** page, or AWS Cost and Usage Report unless your bill transfer account enables this access. Contact your bill transfer account owner with questions about Free Tier benefits.

## Charges received after account closure


You might receive a bill after you close your account due to one of the following reasons:

**You incurred charges in the month before you closed your account**  
You receive a final bill for the usage incurred between the beginning of the month and the date that you closed your account. For example, if you closed your account on January 15, you will receive a bill at the beginning of February for usage incurred from January 1-15.

**You have active Reserved Instances on your account**  
You might have provisioned Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances, Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) Reserved Instances, Amazon Redshift Reserved Instances, or Amazon ElastiCache Reserved Cache Nodes. You will continue to receive a bill for these resources until the reservation period expires. For more information, see [Reserved Instances](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ec2-reserved-instances.html) in the *Amazon EC2 User Guide*.

**You signed up for Savings Plans**  
You will continue to receive a bill for your compute usage covered under Savings Plans until the plan term is completed. For more information about Savings Plans, see the [Savings Plans User Guide](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/savingsplans/latest/userguide/what-is-savings-plans.html).

**You have active AWS Marketplace subscriptions**  
AWS Marketplace subscriptions aren't automatically canceled on account closure. First, [terminate all instances of your software](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/marketplace/latest/buyerguide/buyer-getting-started.html#step-6-terminate-your-instance) in the subscriptions. Then, cancel subscriptions on the [Manage subscriptions](https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/library) page of the AWS Marketplace console.

**Important**  
Within 90 days of closing your account, you can sign in to your account, view resources that are still active, view past billing, and pay for AWS bills. For more information, see [Close your account](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/accounts/latest/reference/manage-acct-closing.html) in the *AWS Account Management Reference Guide*.

To pay your unpaid AWS bills, see [Making payments](manage-making-a-payment.md).

## Charges incurred from resources in AWS Regions that are turned off


If you turn off (disable) an AWS Region that you still have resources in, you will continue to incur charges for those resources. However, can't access the resources in a disabled Region.

To avoid incurring charges from these resources, enable the Region, terminate all resources in that Region, and then disable the Region.

For more information about managing Regions for your account, see [Specify which AWS Regions your account can use](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/accounts/latest/reference/manage-acct-regions.html) in the *AWS Account Management Reference Guide*.

## Charges incurred by services launched by other services


A number of AWS services can launch resources, so be sure to check for anything that might have launched through any service that you've used.

### Charges incurred from resources created by AWS Elastic Beanstalk


Elastic Beanstalk is designed to ensure that all the resources that you need are running, which means that it automatically relaunches any services that you stop. To avoid this, you must terminate your Elastic Beanstalk environment before you terminate resources that Elastic Beanstalk has created. For more information, see [Terminating an Environment](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/latest/dg/using-features.terminating.html) in the *AWS Elastic Beanstalk Developer Guide*. 

### Charges incurred from Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) load balancers


Like Elastic Beanstalk environments, ELB load balancers are designed to keep a minimum number of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances running. You must terminate your load balancer before you delete the Amazon EC2 instances that are registered with it. For more information, see [Delete Your Load Balancer](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticloadbalancing/latest/userguide/US_EndLoadBalancing02.html) in the *Elastic Load Balancing User Guide*. 

### Charges incurred by services started in OpsWorks


If you use the OpsWorks environment to create AWS resources, you must use OpsWorks to terminate those resources or OpsWorks restarts them. For example, if you use OpsWorks to create an Amazon EC2 instance, but then terminate it by using the Amazon EC2 console, the OpsWorks auto healing feature categorizes the instance as failed and restarts it. For more information, see the [AWS OpsWorks User Guide](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/opsworks/latest/userguide/welcome.html).

## Charges incurred by Amazon EC2 instances


After you remove load balancers and Elastic Load Balancing environments, you can stop or terminate Amazon EC2 instances. Stopping an instance allows you to start it again later, but you might be charged for storage. Terminating an instance permanently deletes it. For more information, see [Instance lifecycle](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ec2-instance-lifecycle.html), particularly [Stop and start your instance](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/Stop_Start.html) and [Terminate your Instance](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/terminating-instances.html) in the *Amazon EC2 User Guide*.

**Notes**  
Amazon EC2 instances serve as the foundation for multiple AWS services. They can appear in the Amazon EC2 console instances list even if they were started by other services. For example, Amazon RDS instances run on Amazon EC2 instances. 
If you terminate an underlying Amazon EC2 instance, the service that started it might interpret the termination as a failure and restart the instance. For example, OpsWorks has a feature called *auto healing* that restarts resources when it detects failures. In general, it's a best practice to delete resources through the services that started them.
  


Additionally, if you create Amazon EC2 instances from an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) that is backed by an instance store, check Amazon S3 for the related bundle. Deregistering an AMI doesn't delete the bundle. For more information, see [Deregistering your AMI](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/deregister-ami.html) in the *Amazon EC2 User Guide*.

## Charges incurred by Amazon Elastic Block Store volumes and snapshots


Most Amazon EC2 instances are configured so that their associated Amazon EBS volumes are deleted when they are terminated, but it's possible to set up an instance that preserves its volume and the data. Check the **Volumes** pane in the Amazon EC2 console for volumes that you don’t need anymore. For more information, see [Deleting an Amazon EBS volume](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ebs-deleting-volume.html) in the *Amazon EC2 User Guide*. 

If you have stored snapshots of your Amazon EBS volumes and no longer need them, you should delete them as well. Deleting a volume doesn't automatically delete the associated snapshots.

For more information about deleting snapshots, see [Deleting an Amazon EBS snapshot](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ebs-deleting-snapshot.html) in the *Amazon EC2 User Guide*.

Deleting a snapshot might not reduce your organization's data storage costs. Other snapshots might reference that snapshot's data, and referenced data is always preserved. 

**Example: Deleting a snapshot**  
Say that when you take the first snapshot (*snap-A*) of a volume with 10 GiB of data, the size of the snapshot is also 10 GiB. Because snapshots are incremental, the second snapshot that you take of the same volume contains only blocks of data that changed since the first snapshot was taken.   
The second snapshot (*snap-B*) also references the data in the first snapshot. That is, if you modify 4 GiB of data and take a second snapshot, the size of the second snapshot is 4 GiB. In addition, the second snapshot references the unchanged 6 GiB in the first snapshot. For more information, see [ How snapshots work](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/EBSSnapshots.html#how_snapshots_work) in the *Amazon EC2 User Guide*.   
In this example, you will see two entries in your daily AWS Cost and Usage Reports (AWS CUR). AWS CUR captures the snapshot usage amount for a single day. In this example, the usage is 0.33 GiB (10 GiB/ 30 days) for *snap-A*, and 0.1333 GiB (4 GiB/ 30 days) for *snap-B*. Using the rate of \$10.05 per GB month, *snap-A* costs you 0.33 GiB x \$10.05 = \$10.0165. *Snap-B* costs you 0.133 GiB x \$10.05 = \$10.0066, for a total of \$10.0231 per day for both snapshots. For more information, see the [AWS Data Exports User Guide](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cur/latest/userguide/what-is-cur.html).  


| lineItem/ Operation | lineItem/ ResourceId | lineItem/ UsageAmount | lineItem/ UnblendedCost | resourceTags/ user:usage | 
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | 
| CreateSnapshot | arn:aws:ec2:us-east-1:123:snapshot/snap-A | 0.33 | 0.0165 | dev | 
| CreateSnapshot | arn:aws:ec2:us-east-1:123:snapshot/snap-B | 0.133 | 0.0066 | dev | 
If you delete the first snapshot (*snap-A* in the first row of the previous table), any data that is referenced by the second snapshot (*snap-B* in the second row of the previous table) is preserved. Remember that the second snapshot contains the 4 GiB of incremental data, and references 6 GiB from the first snapshot. After you delete *snap-A*, the size of *snap-B* becomes 10 GiB (4 changed GiB from the *snap-B* and 6 unchanged GiB from *snap-A*).  
In the following table, your daily AWS CUR will have the usage amount for *snap-B* as 0.33 GiB (10 GiB/ 30 days), charged at \$10.0165 per day. When you delete a snapshot, the charges for the remaining snapshots are recalculated daily, resulting in the possibility that the cost for each snapshot can change daily as well.  


| lineItem/ Operation | lineItem/ ResourceId | lineItem/ UsageAmount | lineItem/ UnblendedCost | resourceTags/ user:usage | 
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | 
| CreateSnapshot | arn:aws:ec2:us-east-1:123:snapshot/snap-B | 0.33 | 0.0165 | dev | 
For more information about snapshots, see the [Cost Allocation for EBS Snapshots](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-cost-allocation-for-ebs-snapshots/) blog post.

## Charges incurred by Elastic IP addresses


Any Elastic IP addresses that are attached to an instance that you terminate are unattached, but they are still allocated to you. If you don’t need that IP address anymore, release it to avoid additional charges. For more information, see [Release an Elastic IP address](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/elastic-ip-addresses-eip.html#using-instance-addressing-eips-releasing) in the *Amazon EC2 User Guide*. 

## Charges incurred by storage services


When you're minimizing costs for AWS resources, keep in mind that many services might incur storage costs, such as Amazon RDS and Amazon S3. For more information about storage pricing, see [Amazon S3 pricing](https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/) and [Amazon RDS pricing](https://aws.amazon.com/rds/pricing/).

## Charges incurred for AWS Organizations that use billing transfer


When you sign in as a bill transfer account, you are responsible for paying charges for AWS Organizations that transfer their bills to you.

## Contacting Support


The above is not an exhaustive list of all the reasons why you might see unexpected charges in your AWS account. If you receive charges that aren't due to any of the reasons listed on this page, see [Contacting Support](billing-get-answers.md#billing-support).