Amazon Web Services has updated the AWS Budgets tool it launched last year, to help customers better keep their cloud-computing costs under control.

Judging from AWS Chief Evangelist Jeff Barr’s blog post, it’s safe to assume that some of AWS’s customers might have had a nasty shock at just how much they were spending on its cloud wares.

“This feature is designed to be used by Finance Managers, Project Managers, and VP-level DevOps folks,” Barr writes. He then explains that the tool can be used “…to maintain a unified view of your costs and usage for specific categories that you define, and you can sign up for automated notifications that provide you with detailed status information (over or under budget) so that you can identify potential issues and take action to prevent undesired actual or forecasted overruns.”

With the update clients can now create up to 20,000 budgets, allowing them to allocate monies for each project team or business unit that uses AWS’s cloud. Alternatively, companies might want to create separate plans for calculating the cost of each AWS service they use, Barr said.

Controlling costs is a key aim for any good business, and so Barr offers up a few interesting examples of how the tool could be used in order to do just that:

“I could create a new web app with a fixed budget, and then invoke a AWS Lambda function if costs are approaching the budgeted amount,” he suggests. “The app could take corrective action to ensure that the budget is not exceeded. For example, it could temporarily disable some of the more computationally intensive features, or it could switch over to a statically hosted alternative site.”

One has to wonder how that will go down, since it seems that AWS is implying that companies diminish their customer’s experience when they’re approaching their cloud budget threshold so as not to run up bigger bills. Such tactics might make the accounting department happier, but could also frustrate customers of the companies that do so. Still, it’s an intriguing option for companies worried about overspending.

More likely, AWS is just getting creative in response to similar moves by Microsoft, which has just revamped its Azure Pricing Calculator, and Google, which introduced its own pricing tool earlier this year.