Hidden API Charges that can Increase your CloudWatch Bill by 50%

6 min readMay 19, 2025

Note : All non-members can read my story here. From my featured story on last week, I could see I gained many non-member followers as well which is why I have included these free links on all of my stories now, so feel free to check it out if you were unable to read them completely before.

This will be the last part of CloudWatch Cost Optimisation series. I hope you have benefited from reading previous articles so far.

If you still haven’t read them yet, I am attaching the links for you in the end!

Introduction

In this article, we explore the remaining hidden factor that contribute to most of the billing in CloudWatch.

Yes, unlike other factors, these API calls do not appear anywhere in CloudWatch console as resources. These are APIs that are made in the backend by respective sources which have permission to do so.

Below are the main CloudWatch APIs which incur charges :

PutMetricData
GetMetricData
GetMetricStatistics
GetDashboard, ListDashboards, PutDashboard and DeleteDashboards

There are few additional APIs such as GetInsightRuleReport, GetMetricWidgetImage, ListMetrics…

Hi AwesomeSolutions!

Nice article, can I use it for my newsletter edition next week? It's called the cloud Economist and I share newsletter posts on saving costs with AWS. I would love to use this article, and give you credit of course.
Let me know if that's fine with you?

AWS in Plain English

Hidden API Charges that can Increase your CloudWatch Bill by 50%

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