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 four types of Savings Plans – Compute Savings Plans, EC2 Instance Savings Plans, Database 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. The Database Savings Plans apply to Amazon Aurora, Amazon RDS, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon ElastiCache, Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility), Amazon Neptune, Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra), Amazon Timestream, and AWS DMS usage. The SageMaker Savings Plans apply to Amazon SageMaker usage.

AWS offers four types of Savings Plans:

• 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.

• 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.
  

• Database Savings Plans are a flexible pricing model that offers savings on AWS Database services in exchange for a commitment to a specific amount of usage (measured in $/hour) over a 1-year term. This automatically apply to eligible serverless and provisioned instance usage regardless of supported engine, instance family, size, deployment option, or AWS Region. For example, with Database Savings Plans, you can change between Aurora db.r7g and db.r8g instances, shift a workload from EU (Ireland) to US (Ohio), modernize from Amazon RDS for Oracle to Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL or from RDS to Amazon DynamoDB and still benefit from discounted pricing offered by Database Savings Plans.

• Amazon SageMaker Savings Plans are 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 (exception: Database Savings Plans only offers one payment option). 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. Or you can use Cost Categories to group AWS accounts and purchase Savings Plans at the group level, which prioritizes or restrict discount application within each group. 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. 

Savings Plans offers significant savings over On Demand, just like EC2 RIs, but automatically reduce your bills on compute usage across any AWS region, even as usage changes. This provides you the flexibility to use the compute option that best suits your needs and continue to save money, all without having to perform exchanges or modifications.

Compute Savings Plans, which provides savings up to 66% (just like Convertible RIs), automatically reduce your cost on any EC2 instance usage regardless of region, instance family, size, OS, tenancy and even on AWS Fargate or AWS Lambda. EC2 Instance Savings Plans, which provide savings up to 72% (just like Standard RIs), automatically save you money on any instance usage within a given EC2 instance family in a chosen region (e.g. M5 in N. Virginia) regardless of size, OS or tenancy.

No, Savings Plans does not provide a capacity reservation. You can however reserve capacity with On Demand Capacity Reservations and pay lower prices on them with Savings Plans.

Yes. You can continue purchasing RIs to maintain compatibility with your existing cost management processes, and your RIs will work along-side Savings Plans to reduce your overall bill. However as your RIs expire we encourage you to sign up for Savings Plans as they offer the same savings as RIs, but with additional flexibility.

Database Savings Plans are a flexible pricing model that offers savings on AWS Database services in exchange for a commitment to a specific amount of usage (measured in $/hour) over a 1-year term. 

Database Savings Plans provide coverage across Amazon Aurora, Amazon RDS, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon ElastiCache, Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility), Amazon Neptune, Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra), Amazon Timestream, and AWS Database Migration Service (DMS). As new database services become eligible, they will automatically be included in coverage for your existing Database Savings Plans commitments.

Database Savings Plans offer coverage for Generation 7 and newer instances across all eligible services. Coverage is limited to Valkey instances for ElastiCache and InfluxDB instances for Timestream. Database Savings Plans also cover serverless offerings like Aurora Serverless, ElastiCache Serverless for Valkey, Amazon DocumentDB Serverless, and Neptune Serverless as well as on-demand and provisioned throughput for DynamoDB and Keyspaces.

Database Savings Plans offer broad flexibility in how you use your commitment. You can move usage between included database services, switch between eligible instance types and sizes, change between supported Regions, adopt new instance generations as they become available, and move between provisioned and serverless deployments. For example, with Database Savings Plans, you can change between Aurora db.r7g and db.r8g instances, shift a workload from EU (Ireland) to US (Ohio), or modernize from RDS for Oracle to Aurora PostgreSQL or RDS to DynamoDB, and still benefit from discounted pricing offered by Database Savings Plans.

Your Database Savings Plans commitments automatically apply to your usage at the discounted rates. Any usage beyond your commitment is billed at on-demand rates. This automated application ensures you receive savings without manually managing individual reservations.

You can save up to 35% with Database Savings Plans with discount rates depending on the specific database services and usage types. You can find details on specific rates by usage type and service on the Database Savings Plans pricing page.

Database Savings Plans are available with no upfront payment and a 1-year term. Customers who would like to make an upfront payment can do so via the advance pay feature in the billing console. Advance pay is an existing AWS Billing and Cost Management feature that allows you to pay for your AWS usage in advance.

You can purchase Database Savings Plans from the AWS Billing and Cost Management Console or by using the AWS CLI. To realize the largest savings, you can make a commitment to Savings Plans by using purchase recommendations provided in the console. For a more customized analysis, you can use the Savings Plans Purchase Analyzer to estimate potential cost savings for custom purchase scenarios.

For more information, visit the Database Savings Plans pricing page and the AWS Savings Plans FAQs. Once purchase a Savings Plan, eligible 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. You can expect to see savings show up in your bill within 8 hours of purchase.

Database Savings Plans discounts cannot be combined with Reserved Instances or DynamoDB reserved capacity on the same workload. You can, however, purchase reservations to cover one workload and a Database Savings Plans to cover another.

For example, you can purchase an RI to cover db.r5 instances for Amazon Aurora MySQL while purchasing Savings Plans cover db.r8g instances and serverless usage for Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL. This approach ensures that customers can maintain existing savings on older instance generations while gaining additional flexibility on newer generations through Database Savings Plans.

Your choice should align with your operational needs and cost optimization goals. You should choose Database Savings Plans if you want the flexibility to move between services and instance types, the ability to adopt new technologies without managing separate commitments, or simplified cost management across database services. Reserved Instances are ideal if you have stable, predictable workloads on specific instance types or if you want to maximize savings through longer 3-year commitments.

We recommend that you switch from Reserved Instances to Database Savings Plans as your Reserved Instance commitments expire. You can also buy Database Savings Plans to cover usage not currently covered by Reserved Instances without having to wait for existing Reserved Instance commitments to expire.

If you have a consistent amount of Amazon SageMaker instance usage (measured in $/hour), and use multiple SageMaker components or expect your technology configuration (e.g. instance family, region) to change over time, SageMaker Savings Plans make it simpler to maximize your savings while providing flexibility to change underlying technology configuration based on application needs or new innovation. The Savings Plans rate apply automatically to all eligible ML instance usage with no manual modifications required.

The difference between Savings Plans for Amazon SageMaker and Savings Plans for EC2 is in the services they include. SageMaker Savings Plans is only applicable to SageMaker ML Instance usage.