Lock in your commitments
Savings Plans, Reserved Instances and reservations: stop paying on-demand for steady-state workloads.
Lessons in this path
- 1 Cost AWS
Purchase Compute Savings Plans
Commit to a steady dollar-per-hour of compute for one or three years and take up to ~66% off On-Demand — without locking yourself into a single instance shape.
14 min - 2 Cost AWS
Purchase EC2 Instance Savings Plans
Commit to a dollar-per-hour of spend within one EC2 instance family in one region for a deeper discount than a Compute Savings Plan — at the cost of flexibility outside that family.
14 min - 3 Cost AWS
Purchase EC2 Reserved Instances
For pure discount, a Savings Plan has quietly superseded the EC2 Reserved Instance — so the honest reason to still buy an RI is the one thing a Savings Plan can't give you: a guaranteed capacity reservation in a specific AZ.
15 min - 4 Cost AWS
Purchase RDS Reserved Instances
RDS is the one big workload Savings Plans don't touch — Reserved DB Instances are the only commitment lever, and they pay back up to ~60% if you commit to the right shape.
14 min - 5 Cost AWS
Purchase Redshift Reserved Nodes
Redshift is another workload no Savings Plan touches — Reserved Nodes are the only commitment lever for provisioned clusters, paying back up to ~75% if you commit to the right node type.
14 min - 6 Cost AWS
Purchase ElastiCache Reserved Nodes
No Savings Plan touches ElastiCache — Reserved Nodes are the only commitment lever, and they pay back up to ~55% if you commit to the right node type in the right region.
14 min - 7 Cost AWS
Purchase MemoryDB Reserved Nodes
MemoryDB is a durable in-memory database, not a cache — Reserved Nodes are its only commitment lever, but they cover node hours and leave the durable-storage and write charges at full price.
14 min - 8 Cost AWS
Purchase OpenSearch Reserved Instances
No Savings Plan touches OpenSearch — Reserved Instances are the only commitment lever, and they pay back up to ~50% if you right-size the domain and tier the data first.
14 min - 9 Cost AWS
Purchase DynamoDB Reserved Capacity
If your high-volume DynamoDB tables run in provisioned mode with steady throughput, reserved capacity buys the same RCUs and WCUs for up to ~77% less — but it does nothing for On-Demand tables.
14 min - 10 Cost AWS
Purchase SageMaker Savings Plans
Commit to a steady dollar-per-hour of Amazon SageMaker ML compute for one or three years and take up to ~64% off On-Demand — but size it to the steady inference baseline, not the training spikes.
14 min - 11 Cost AWS
Manage expiring reservations
When a Reserved Instance, Reserved Node, or Savings Plan reaches the end of its term without a replacement, every workload it covered silently reverts to On-Demand — a 30–70% bill spike that lands as unexplained variance the next month.
14 min - 12 Cost AWS
Fix unused Reserved Instances and Savings Plans
A commitment only saves money if a workload is actually consuming it — when utilisation drops below 100%, you're paying for reserved capacity nothing is using, and that gap is locked in for the rest of the term.
14 min