Managing AWS Promotional credits: A guide for educational organizations

AWS Promotional credits

AWS Promotional Credits are incentives offered by AWS to encourage and support cloud adoption, particularly among public sector organizations like academic institutions and research communities. It helps organizations achieve strategic objectives such as:

1. Accelerate cloud adoption: Helps organizations transition to and expand their use of AWS services.
2. Support education: Enables academic institutions to enhance course offerings and provide students with hands-on cloud computing experience.
3. Foster innovation: Encourages research communities to develop new solutions using AWS technologies.
4. Enable proofs of concept: Allows organizations to explore cutting-edge technologies and pilot newer AWS services.
5. Facilitate digital transformation: Streamlines cloud migration processes and supports business growth through technical enablement to market deployment.

Credits are assigned either automatically to individual accounts or issued as promotion codes that can be redeemed on individual AWS accounts, for accessing and utilizing AWS services.

View and manage your AWS credits in the AWS Billing and Cost Management Console under the Credits section in the navigation pane. For detailed guidance, see the documentation links provided below.

Redeem your AWS promotional credit

Applying AWS promotions

Once promotional codes are redeemed and credits are available in an individual AWS account, they are automatically applied to bills to help cover costs that are associated with eligible services and these are applied until they are exhausted or they expire. Each AWS promotional credit is associated with multiple properties like Credit Name, Expiration Date, Amount Remaining, Amount Used, Applicable Products. These properties will help us to understand how the credits are applied against the AWS services consumed and help us to effectively track the overall usage. To support variety of use cases particularly in widely spread organizations, such as universities and research institutions. AWS offers user preference on AWS credits called Credit sharing that can help customers maximize the benefits on their available resources.

Credit Sharing

AWS Credit Sharing enables organizations to distribute credits across multiple accounts within their AWS organization. This feature allows for strategic allocation of resources, supporting diverse needs from compute-intensive research to student coursework and innovative development projects. Organizations can also opt to disable credit sharing for granular budget control at the account level. This flexible management tool can help public sector customers, particularly educational and research institutions, to optimize cloud usage and maximize the efficiency of their limited funds.

You can manage credit sharing for member accounts in the AWS Billing and Cost Management Console under the Billing Preferences section in the navigation pane by editing Credit sharing preferences

Understanding credits usage

To gather better understanding on how credits are applied against your usage, we should consider some common user scenarios.

Scenario 1: In the beginning of the year 2025, An individual Example University’s AWS account, were issued AWS credits for their academic research work that involves mainly usage of Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3. The AWS account already has 2 active credits that were issued for the same research work during the 2rd quarter of 2024 and 3rd quarter of 2024 respectively as shown below.

The AWS credits are applied to the bill as described below:

• Billing cycle begins on the first day of each month; Credits are applied to the remaining balance after any applicable Reserved Instances or Savings plan discounts are applied and after any volume or other contractual discounts are applied to your usage.
• To maximize the benefits, the credits are applied to the largest service charge and are applied in a descending pattern for remainder of the eligible service charges.
• The soonest to expire amongst the credits takes precedence in usage. In this scenario, credits associated to Academic Research Funding - August 2024 are applied to the bill first
• The credit with more specific list of applied products or least number of services is considered next for usage. For example if Academic Research Funding - February 2025 had only Amazon S3 listed in the applicable products then this credit takes the next precedence
• The next credit that takes precedence would be the oldest of all credits issued which is Academic Research Funding - May 2024 in this scenario.
• The process will repeat month over month until your credits are consumed or your usage is covered

Scenario 2: Extending to the scenario explained above, the individual account now has joined the larger AWS Organization of Example University during the month, which has credit sharing turned on.

In this scenario, credits are applied as mentioned below:

• If the individual account join the AWS organization later in a month then the credits associated to that individual account do not cover the usage from the day that the account joined the organization to the end of the month.
• Starting next month, credits are applied to the organization's consolidated bill
• The billing cycle begins on the first day of each month.
• The account that owns the credit is covered first for the service charges
• Credits are applied within this account in a similar manner as explained in the Scenario 1
• Credits are applied next, to the AWS account within the Organization with the highest spend

For more scenarios and to gain better understanding, please refer Applying Credits

Common Customer Challenges

Here are the common challenges customers face when using AWS Promotional Credits:

• Not knowing which AWS services are covered by credits
• Letting credits expire, leading to underutilization
• Depletion of AWS credits before project or research completion
• Lack of clarity on how credits are applied, particularly where there are multiple credits involved
• Understanding the impact due to credit sharing

AWS assists customers overcome these challenges by developing robust credit management strategies and empowering organizations to better monitor, forecast, and optimize their credit usage.

Best Practices

Here are top 5 best practice recommendations to manage AWS credits effectively:

Understanding AWS Services covered by AWS Credits

Before utilizing AWS promotional credits, review the AWS promotional credit terms & conditions to understand service eligibility and credit validity. AWS promotional credits are only applied to the specific services designated by your AWS contracting entity and are often not applicable to any upfront fee for any services such as Savings plans, Reserved Instances, charges for AWS support, AWS Marketplace and AWS Professional Services. Understanding these coverage boundaries helps ensure effective credit utilization and prevents unexpected costs.

Monitor AWS Credit consumption

Frequently view and manage your AWS credits in the AWS Billing and Cost Management Console under the Credits section. Tracking key credit attributes like amount used, amount remaining, expiration date and applicable products is imperative for effective management of AWS credits.

Use Cost Explorer to view credit usage against your workloads

AWS Cost Explorer provides clear visibility into how your credits are being utilized across workloads. By filtering Credit as your Charge Type and conducting monthly reviews, you can track effectiveness and implement timely adjustments to optimize your credit usage.

Controlling how credits are shared among your accounts

To optimize credit usage, align your credit sharing preferences with your organization's strategic objectives. This approach helps prevent unexpected issues in credit utilization. For detailed guidance on managing credit sharing within your organization, refer to this blog post on the topic.

Use AWS Budgets to track spending

Setting up AWS Budgets alerts can help you to monitor any anomalous spending that may be incurred especially from services that are not covered for credit usage.

Conclusion

And finally, check with your account team to further understand your AWS promotional credits. You can also post your inquiries or appeals regarding your AWS promotional credits by opening a case with AWS Support to get a direct assistance from an associate.