Savings Plans
A Savings Plan is a commitment to spend a given amount per hour, in dollars, for one or three years (one year only for Database Savings Plans). In exchange, usage up to that commitment is billed at a discounted rate. Unlike a Reserved Instance, the commitment is to spend rather than to a specific instance configuration, which is what makes it easier to live with.
Commitment terms cannot be changed after purchase. As usage grows, you buy an additional plan rather than modifying the existing one.
Payment options
Section titled “Payment options”All upfront, partial upfront, or no upfront. More upfront means a larger discount. Database Savings Plans are the exception: they are sold with no upfront payment only.
The four types
Section titled “The four types”| Type | Covers | AWS quotes up to |
|---|---|---|
| Compute Savings Plans | EC2 across any instance family, size, Region, OS and tenancy, plus Fargate and Lambda | 66% |
| EC2 Instance Savings Plans | One instance family in one Region, any size, OS or tenancy within it | 72% |
| Database Savings Plans | Aurora, RDS, DynamoDB, ElastiCache, DocumentDB, Timestream, Neptune, Keyspaces, DMS and OpenSearch Service, including serverless usage | 35% |
| SageMaker AI Savings Plans | SageMaker AI across instance families, sizes, Regions and components | 64% |
Compute Savings Plans are the flexible option. A workload can move from c5 to m5, from Ireland to London, or from EC2 to ECS on Fargate, and keep the discounted rate throughout. If you expect the shape of your compute to change over the commitment, this is the one to buy.
EC2 Instance Savings Plans give the deepest discount in exchange for pinning a family and a Region. You can still change instance size, operating system and tenancy within that family.
Database Savings Plans are the newest type and the one most likely to be missing from older notes. Unlike the other three, they are sold on a one-year term with no upfront payment only; customers who want to prepay use advance pay in the billing console. They apply to the latest provisioned instance generations regardless of engine, family, size, Availability Zone or Region, and to serverless usage. Because they span engines, a migration from RDS for Oracle to Aurora PostgreSQL, or from RDS to DynamoDB, keeps its discount.
SageMaker AI Savings Plans have been generally available for several years — they are not a planned feature — and apply across notebook, training and inference usage.
What they do not cover
Section titled “What they do not cover”- Spot Instances. Spot already carries its own discount; a Savings Plan adds nothing on top, and Spot spend does not consume a Compute Savings Plans commitment.
- The Dedicated Instance fee. The $2 per hour per Region charge for running Dedicated Instances is not discounted.
- Amazon EKS control-plane charges. Compute and EC2 Instance plans do apply to the EC2 instances underneath EMR, EKS and ECS clusters, but not to the EKS charge itself.
Savings Plans or Reserved Instances
Section titled “Savings Plans or Reserved Instances”Savings Plans are simpler and, for EC2 compute, generally the better default. Reserved Instances still matter where there is no equivalent Savings Plan, and — for zonal RIs — where a capacity reservation is required, which no Savings Plan provides. See instance purchasing options.
Before buying anything, look at the Savings Plans recommendations in AWS Cost Explorer, which model a commitment against your own usage history, and set a Savings Plans utilization budget afterwards so an under-used commitment is noticed rather than quietly paid for. See AWS cost management tools.