Intelligence Overview

Intelligence is frugally.app's AWS billing analysis pillar. It gives you visibility into where your money is going, how well your commitments are being used, and whether anything unusual is happening with your spend.

Open Intelligence

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What Intelligence provides

Feature	What it does
Cost Explorer	Slice and dice your AWS costs by service, account, region, or tag
Commitment Utilisation	Track how effectively your Reserved Instances and Savings Plans are being used
Cost Anomaly Detection	Detect unexpected spending spikes and get alerted before they become problems

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Data sources

Intelligence pulls data from your AWS accounts via:

• AWS Cost and Usage Reports (CUR) — Detailed line-item billing data
• AWS Cost Explorer API — Aggregated cost and usage data

Data is fetched automatically from all healthy Connections. No additional setup is needed beyond connecting your AWS accounts.

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Data freshness and caching

Aspect	Detail
Refresh interval	Cost data is refreshed every 30 minutes
Cache TTL	30 minutes — repeated queries within this window use cached data
Daily API call cap	Applies per Connection to stay within AWS Cost Explorer API limits
Monthly API call cap	Aggregate limit across all Connections

note

AWS Cost and Usage Reports can take up to 24 hours to reflect the most recent charges. Data for the current day may be incomplete until the following day.

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IAM permissions

Intelligence requires the following IAM permissions on each Connection's role:

{
  "Effect": "Allow",
  "Action": [
    "ce:GetCostAndUsage",
    "ce:GetCostForecast",
    "ce:GetReservationUtilization",
    "ce:GetSavingsPlansUtilization",
    "ce:GetAnomalies",
    "ce:GetAnomalyMonitors",
    "ce:GetAnomalySubscriptions"
  ],
  "Resource": "*"
}

For the full IAM policy, see IAM Role Permissions.

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How Intelligence relates to other pillars

• Automate — Intelligence shows the cost impact of your automation. The Projected vs Actual Savings chart ties Intelligence data to Automate results.
• Guard — Intelligence data feeds into Guard's Budgets for threshold tracking and into Cost Attribution for team-level cost breakdowns.