Two different questions
AWS Cost Explorer answers 'what did I spend, and on what?' It is a billing analytics tool: it breaks total spend down by service, account, region, and tag, and it can forecast next month based on recent trends. It is free, built into every AWS account, and genuinely useful for understanding where money goes at a high level.
It does not answer a different question: 'which specific resource, right now, is costing me money for no reason?' Cost Explorer shows you that EC2 spend went up $340 this month. It does not tell you that the $340 came from a single stopped m5.large instance still billing for its attached EBS volume and Elastic IP. That gap is where idle-resource monitoring tools like Driftak operate.
What AWS Cost Explorer actually gives you
- ✓Historical spend broken down by service, linked account, region, and cost allocation tag
- ✓Month-over-month and day-over-day trend charts
- ✓Spend forecasting based on recent usage patterns
- ✓Reserved Instance and Savings Plans utilization and coverage reports
All of this is aggregate. Cost Explorer groups dollars by category — it does not enumerate individual resources or tell you whether a specific EC2 instance, EBS volume, or RDS database is actually being used. To find that out, you would need to cross-reference Cost Explorer's numbers against the EC2, RDS, and EBS consoles manually, instance by instance.
What Driftak does instead
Driftak connects to your AWS account with a read-only IAM Role and scans for resources in a specific idle state: EC2 instances that are stopped, EBS volumes that are unattached, Elastic IPs that are not associated with a running instance, RDS instances that are stopped, and load balancers with no healthy targets. Each finding comes with an estimated monthly cost and shows up in your dashboard as a specific, named resource — not a line item in a chart.
When a rule you configure is met, Driftak sends a notification through Slack, email, Telegram, or a webhook, so you find out about the waste as it accumulates rather than at the end of the billing cycle.
Side-by-side
- ✓Total spend by service and account: Cost Explorer yes, Driftak no
- ✓Spend forecasting: Cost Explorer yes, Driftak no
- ✓Names specific idle resources (which EC2 instance, which volume): Cost Explorer no, Driftak yes
- ✓Sends an alert when a resource goes idle: Cost Explorer no, Driftak yes (Slack, email, Telegram, webhook)
- ✓Read-only IAM access, no stored credentials: Cost Explorer n/a (native AWS), Driftak yes
- ✓Price: Cost Explorer free, Driftak free tier available, Starter $29/month, Pro $99/month
Why this is not really a competition
Cost Explorer and Driftak solve different problems and work well together. Cost Explorer is where you go to understand overall spend trends and answer questions from finance about why the bill changed month to month. Driftak is where you go to find out, on an ongoing basis, exactly which resources are sitting idle right now and act on them before the next bill arrives.
If your team already reviews Cost Explorer monthly and still gets surprised by the bill, that is usually a sign the surprise is coming from resources Cost Explorer's aggregate view was never going to surface on its own — a forgotten dev database, an orphaned load balancer, a stopped instance nobody terminated.
When you actually need idle-resource monitoring
If your team is small and disciplined about cleaning up after every experiment, Cost Explorer plus a manual monthly review might be enough. If you have more than a handful of engineers provisioning infrastructure, multiple AWS accounts, or a history of 'we should really clean that up' conversations that never happen, automated detection closes the gap that a billing dashboard cannot.
Driftak connects with a read-only IAM Role in about 5 minutes — no credentials stored, no agents installed. The IAM policy is public and auditable before you connect. The first scan on an account that has been running for a while typically turns up idle resources nobody remembered were still on.