Chatting about your costs

You can ask Amazon Q about your historical and forecasted AWS cost data as well as how to optimize your costs. Amazon Q can retrieve your cost data, explain costs, and analyze cost trends, so you can understand your costs without referring to documentation or interrupting your workflow. Amazon Q can also provide recommendations on how to optimize your AWS costs, including rightsizing instances, stopping or deleting idle or unused resources, migrating EC2 instances to AWS Graviton-based instances, and purchasing Savings Plans.

When you ask Amazon Q about your costs, its response includes the specific parameters used to retrieve the data, as well as a link to learn more in the AWS Management Console.

For more information about cost analysis in Amazon Q, see Analyzing and optimizing your costs using generative AI with Amazon Q Developer in the AWS Cost Management User Guide.

Prerequisites

You can chat about your AWS costs in the AWS Management Console and in configured chat applications.

For Amazon Q to answer questions about your costs, the following prerequisites must be met.

Add permissions

To chat about your costs, your IAM identity must have permissions to chat with Amazon Q, access your billing data, and retrieve cost optimization recommendations. For an IAM policy that grants the required permissions, see Allow Amazon Q to access cost data and provide cost optimization recommendations.

Enable AWS Cost Explorer and AWS Cost Optimization Hub

To chat about your costs with Amazon Q, you must enable AWS Cost Explorer in your AWS account. To enable Cost Explorer, open the Cost Explorer console. For more information, see Enabling Cost Explorer in the AWS Cost Management User Guide.

To receive cost optimization recommendations from Amazon Q, you must enable AWS Cost Optimization Hub. For more information, see Getting started with Cost Optimization Hub in the AWS Cost Management User Guide.

Example questions

Following are example questions about costs that you can ask Amazon Q: