# Understanding your estimated monthly usage summary


When you enable granular data in Cost Explorer, it increases the number of usage records Cost Explorer needs to host for your organization. To ensure Cost Explorer can respond to queries as quickly as possible, Cost Explorer limits the amount of granular data stored for your organization.

**Note**  
If you enable hourly granularity for both **EC2-Instances (Elastic Compute Cloud - Compute) resource-level data** and **Cost and usage data for all AWS services at hourly granularity (without resource-level data)**, you will see a drop in the hourly usage records reported against **Cost and usage**. This is because the EC2 hourly usage records are moved and reported under **EC2-Instances**.

In Cost Management preferences, you can view the estimated usage records count for your granular data preference selections and understand how close you are to the Cost Explorer data limits. See "Understanding Cost Explorer data threshold limits".

Hourly granularity in Cost Explorer is a paid feature and the cost depends on your hourly usage records count. Understanding your estimated usage records count for hourly granularity features can help you estimate the cost of these features before enabling them. See "Estimating cost for Cost Explorer hourly granularity".

**Note**  
The usage records displayed in Cost Management preferences are for your entire organization and are estimates based on your average past usage. The actual usage records in any given past, current, or future month might differ from these values. If you’re a new AWS customer and haven’t used AWS for at least a month, we can’t estimate your usage records due to insufficient data.

**Topics**
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# Understanding Cost Explorer data threshold limits
](ce-data-threshold-limits.md)
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# Estimating cost for Cost Explorer hourly granularity
](ce-hourly-granularity.md)

# Understanding Cost Explorer data threshold limits


Cost Explorer supports up to 500 million usage records for resource-level data at daily granularity and up to 500 million usage records for hourly granularity features (EC2 resource-level data at hourly granularity and hourly granularity for all services without resources).

To make sure Cost Explorer can deliver an optimal customer experience, if your estimated usage records is above these limits, you’ll receive a data threshold error and you won’t be able to save your preferences.

If you receive the data threshold error while setting resource-level data at daily granularity, you can reduce the number of services you want to enable resource-level data for. If the error still persists, consider retrieving your data using Cost and Usage Reports (CUR). You can set CUR to include resource IDs.

If you receive the data threshold error while setting hourly granularity, consider choosing between hourly cost and usage data for all services without resource-level data and EC2 resource-level data at hourly granularity. If the error still persists, consider retrieving your data using Cost and Usage Reports (CUR). You can set CUR to get cost and usage information at hourly granularity with resource IDs.

# Estimating cost for Cost Explorer hourly granularity


Cost Explorer offers hourly granularity data at a daily charge of \$10.00000033 per usage record, which translates to \$10.01 per 1,000 usage records monthly. A usage record corresponds to a line item with a specific resource and usage type.

Cost Explorer bills you daily based on the total hourly usage records hosted in Cost Explorer for the past 14 days. For example, if you run one EC2 instance all day every day for the past month, and you have hourly granularity enabled, Cost Explorer will host 336 records per day (24 hours x 14 days) and charge you \$10.0001 daily (\$10.00000033 per record x 336 records), resulting in a monthly bill of \$10.003 (\$10.0001 daily cost x 30).

For the provided estimated usage records count, you can calculate the cost yourself using the provided formula, or you can use AWS Pricing Calculator.

**Note**  
Granular data visibility is only available for billing views that show chargeable data. When you use Billing Conductor as an account in a standard billing group or billing transfer billing group, you can't view granular data in Cost Explorer.