A company wants to add its AWS usage cost to an operations-cost dashboard and must access cost data programmatically for the current year and a 12‑month forecast. Which solution provides this capability with the LEAST operational overhead?

The AWS Cost Explorer API allows programmatic access to cost and usage data, including historical data for the current year and forecasted data for 12 months. Using pagination with the API is the most efficient way to retrieve large datasets with minimal operational overhead, as it directly integrates with existing dashboards. Downloading CSV files requires manual or scripted processing to integrate, increasing overhead. AWS Budgets actions and reports are primarily for notification and automated responses to budget thresholds, not for programmatic extraction of detailed cost data for dashboard integration. They also don't natively support FTP or SMTP for sending raw cost data in a dashboard-friendly format.