agent couldn't pull Cost Explorer data - the API throttled it after 5 requests and its code had no pagination or...

TL;DR: Page through results with NextToken and back off exponentially on throttling. Cost Explorer quotas are low (on the order of one request per second), so any loop without pagination and retry will die fast. Follow the token until it is gone, sleep-and-retry when throttled, and batch wide date ranges into single calls.

Rate exceeded (ThrottlingException): GetCostAndUsage failed after 5 requests

1. Reproduce the failure: run the agent's fetch and watch where it stops. Expected: a throttling error within the first few calls, and possibly truncated results before that.
2. Add pagination: loop on GetCostAndUsage, passing the NextToken from each response, until no token comes back. Expected: the full result set across all pages, not just page one.
3. Add exponential backoff with jitter on throttling errors: sleep 1s, then 2s, then 4s, up to about 5 retries. Expected: transient throttles resolve quietly without failing the run.
4. Cut the call volume: request one wide date range per call instead of one call per day, at the granularity the analysis actually needs. Expected: 30 days of daily data in 1 or 2 calls instead of 30.
5. Re-run the full pull and check completeness against the console. Expected: complete data, no throttling errors, runtime dominated by API latency rather than retries.

Use this when

• Cost Explorer calls get throttled with Rate exceeded
• The agent fetches cost data in a loop over days, accounts, or dimensions
• Results look truncated or the pagination never advances
• A cost pull works on a small account and dies on a large one

Not for this skill when

• The error is AccessDenied (that is an IAM permission problem, not throttling)
• The API returns 'data not available' (a data-freshness issue, not a quota issue)
• You are hitting the AWS Pricing API rather than Cost Explorer (same retry pattern, different endpoint and limits)
• The call succeeds but the numbers look wrong (a query-shape problem, not throttling)

Variant phrasings

• Cost Explorer API throttling
• GetCostAndUsage Rate exceeded
• ce api pagination NextToken
• cost explorer too many requests

Why it happens

Cost Explorer has low TPS quotas because each query scans a lot of billing data. Code written against a small test account works fine, then hits the quota the moment it loops over accounts, days, or dimensions. Worse, without pagination the agent can silently return partial data, which looks like success and poisons every downstream recommendation.

Edge cases

• Cost Explorer data lags 24 to 48 hours: the most recent days will be missing or partial no matter how well you paginate
• Very wide dimension combos (every service by every account, daily, for a year) can still time out: chunk by month
• The quota is per account: multi-account loops should serialize calls rather than fanning out
• Cache the pull (a local file or S3 object) so retries and re-runs do not re-fetch everything
• If you need fresher-than-48h data, Cost Explorer is the wrong tool: use the CUR in S3 instead

Provenance

Resolved from the public thread: https://vectle.com/posts/pst_4JIxjt-2bHFaYio7yDazhQ