Savings Plans FAQs

Savings Plans is a flexible pricing model offering lower prices compared to On-Demand pricing, in exchange for a specific usage commitment (measured in $/hour) for a one- or three-year period. AWS offers three types of Savings Plans – Compute Savings Plans, EC2 Instance Savings Plans, and SageMaker Savings Plans. Compute Savings Plans apply to usage across Amazon EC2, AWS Lambda, and AWS Fargate. The EC2 Instance Savings Plans apply to EC2 usage, and SageMaker Savings Plans apply to SageMaker usage.

AWS offers three types of Savings Plans:

1. Compute Savings Plans provide the most flexibility and help to reduce your costs by up to 66%. These plans automatically apply to EC2 instance usage regardless of instance family, size, AZ, region, OS or tenancy, and also apply to Fargate and Lambda usage. For example, with Compute Savings Plans, you can change from C4 to M5 instances, shift a workload from EU (Ireland) to EU (London), or move a workload from EC2 to Fargate or Lambda at any time and automatically continue to pay the Savings Plans price.
    
2. EC2 Instance Savings Plans provide the lowest prices, offering savings up to 72% in exchange for commitment to usage of individual instance families in a region (e.g. M5 usage in N. Virginia). This automatically reduces your cost on the selected instance family in that region regardless of AZ, size, OS or tenancy. EC2 Instance Savings Plans give you the flexibility to change your usage between instances within a family in that region. For example, you can move from c5.xlarge running Windows to c5.2xlarge running Linux and automatically benefit from the Savings Plans prices.
    
3. Amazon SageMaker Savings Plans is a flexible pricing model for Amazon SageMaker, in exchange for a commitment to a consistent amount of usage (measured in $/hour) for a one- or three-year term. Amazon SageMaker Savings Plans provide the most flexibility and help to reduce your costs by up to 64%. These plans automatically apply to eligible SageMaker ML instance usages including SageMaker Studio Notebook, SageMaker On-Demand Notebook, SageMaker Processing, SageMaker Data Wrangler, SageMaker Training, SageMaker Real-Time Inference, and SageMaker Batch Transform regardless of instance family, size, or region. For example, you can change usage from a CPU instance ml.c5.xlarge running in US East (Ohio) to a ml.Inf1 instance in US West (Oregon) for inference workloads at any time and automatically continue to pay the Savings Plans price.

You can get started with Savings Plans from the AWS Billing and Cost Management console or by using the API/CLI. You can easily make a commitment to Savings Plans by using the recommendations provided in AWS Billing and Cost Management, to realize the biggest savings. The recommended hourly commitment is based on your historical On Demand usage and your choice of plan type, term length, and payment option. For a more specific analysis, you can use the Savings Plans Purchase Analyzer in AWS Billing and Cost Management to estimate potential cost savings for custom Savings Plans purchase scenarios. Once you sign up for a Savings Plan, your compute usage will automatically be charged at the discounted Savings Plans prices and any usage beyond your commitment will be charged at regular On Demand rates.

Savings Plans is available in 3 different payment options. The No Upfront option does not require any upfront payment, and your commitment will be charged purely on a monthly basis. The Partial Upfront option offers lower prices on Savings Plans. With this option you be charged at least half of your commitment upfront and the remaining will be charged on a monthly basis. With the All Upfront option, you will receive the lowest prices and your entire commitment will be charged in one payment.

The prices offered by Savings Plans are available on the pricing page here and can also be obtained using APIs/CLI. After you sign up, you can view the prices offered by your active Savings Plans in the AWS Management console or by using the API/CLI.

Savings Plans can be purchased in any account within an AWS Organization/Consolidated Billing family. By default, the benefit provided by Savings Plans is applicable to usage across all accounts within an AWS Organization/consolidated billing family. However, you can also choose to restrict the benefit of Savings Plans to only the account that purchased them.

AWS Cost Explorer will show you details on the savings realized with your Savings Plans. You can also use the Savings Plans performance reports in AWS Cost Explorer to understand how well you are utilizing your Savings Plans.

Yes. Your AWS bill will be generated by taking into account all active Savings Plans.

Any Savings Plans that has an hourly commitment of $100 or less, purchased in the past 7 days and in the same calendar month can be returned. Once you return your Savings Plans you will receive a 100% refund for any upfront charges made towards the Savings Plans and these refunds will be reflected in your bill within 24 hours of return. Any usage that was covered by the plan will be charged at On-Demand rates or get covered by a different Savings Plans, if applicable.