What do I need to know about Savings Plans before I purchase one?

Resolution

Long-term contracts

Savings Plans have contract terms that are usually 1 or 3 years. It's a best practice to purchase Savings Plans when you plan to commit to a consistent amount of usage over a long period of time.

Payment Options

The following payment options are available for Savings Plans:

• No Upfront doesn't require any upfront payment. You're charged on a monthly basis.
• Partial Upfront requires at least half of your payment upfront. The remaining is charged on a monthly basis.
• All Upfront offers the lowest prices. You're charged in one payment.

If your AWS account is in an organization's consolidated billing family, then additional considerations might apply. For more information, see How is the pricing benefit of a Savings Plan applied across an organization's consolidated bill?

Support Plan Fees

If you have an AWS Support plan, then you might see higher support costs for the month that you purchase a Savings Plan. AWS Support plan pricing is based on a percentage of your monthly AWS spending, and the Savings Plan purchase counts toward the percentage.

Cancel or modify a Savings Plan

You can't modify or cancel Savings Plans. To increase your hourly commitment, purchase additional Savings Plans. You can schedule your Savings Plans purchases for a specific date and time in the future. 

Savings Plans are limited to the account that purchases them. You can't transfer them across accounts, but you can share benefits that you purchase through AWS Organizations within the organization.

Capacity Reservations and short-term discounts

Savings Plans don't provide On-Demand Capacity Reservations. 

For short-term discounts on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, launch a Spot Instance instead.

Pricing and purchasing a Savings Plan

For pricing information on Savings Plans, see Compute and EC2 instance Savings Plans and Machine Learning Savings Plans.

To purchase a Savings Plans, see Purchasing Savings Plans.

To use APIs to purchase Savings Plans, see CreateSavingsPlan.

Related information

How can I use AWS Cost Explorer to analyze my spending and usage?

Compute Savings Plans and Reserved Instances

Understanding Savings Plans recommendations