# Why Do I See New Monthly Charges from AWS Cost Explorer?

To populate historical AWS billing data used to provide commitment recommendations & cost visibility, Archera uses a few Metered APIs in your AWS account that may have small costs associated with them.

This primarily includes:

* **AWS Cost Explorer** (priced at $0.01 per API call)
* **AWS Costs and Usage Report** (which AWS generates in your Account's S3 Buckets with associated storage & access costs)
* **Additional metered services** like AWS Compute Optimizer (optional)

## Expected Cost Impact

For most customers, calls to these APIs correspond to a cost increase of no more than **$20 for the first month** using Archera, as we make API calls to fill historical data in our caches, then around **$2 per month** going forward as we refresh our caches with the latest monthly data.

## Why These Costs Are Necessary

Unfortunately even if you were to pull this data from AWS yourself, they will bill you anytime you want to generate and pull your detailed historical costs & usage. If you are looking to optimize AWS costs with or without Archera there is no way around these charges, and due to Archera's caching of your cost data to minimize calls to metered AWS APIs, it is by far the most efficient way to access & consume this data.

## Related Resources

* [Why does AWS Cost Explorer Show a Cost Increase After Archera Commitment Purchases?](https://docs.archera.ai/help-center/aws-faq/cost-explorer-increase)
* [Why Not Just Use AWS Cost Explorer?](https://docs.archera.ai/help-center/aws-faq/why-not-cost-explorer)