S3 Storage Lens Advanced provides valuable insights into storage usage and trends, but it incurs a recurring cost. Organisations often enable it during an optimization initiative but fail to turn it off afterwards. When no active storage efficiency efforts are underway, these advanced metrics can become an unnecessary expense, especially at large scale across many buckets.
Advanced metrics include things like:
Cost optimization recommendations
Data retrieval patterns
Encryption and access control analytics
Historical trends beyond the 30-day free tier
Because the configuration is global or account-level, it’s easy to forget that these additional metrics are enabled and quietly incurring cost. This inefficiency often surfaces in organizations that over-invest in observability tooling without aligning it to an ongoing operational workflow.
S3 Storage Lens Advanced is billed based on:
The number of metrics collected per object and bucket
The number of buckets monitored
Data retention period (up to 15 months for advanced metrics)
Pricing is tiered and additive to standard S3 storage costs
Costs can range from a few dollars to hundreds of dollars monthly, depending on bucket count and object volume
Charges apply per AWS account or organization, depending on the configuration scope
Billing continues as long as Storage Lens Advanced is enabled, even if the data is not actively reviewed or used.
