What should I consider before purchasing Savings Plans?

Resolution

When deciding if Savings Plans are right for you, consider the following factors.

Long-term contracts

Savings Plans have long contract terms, usually one or three years. Therefore, it's a best practice to purchase Savings Plans when you plan to commit to a consistent amount of usage over the long term.

Payment Options

Savings Plans are available with three different payment options:

• 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?

Canceling and modifying 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. For more information, see Can I schedule my Savings Plan to renew automatically?

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 that 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 Savings Plans and Machine Learning Savings Plans.

To complete a Savings Plans purchase, see Purchasing Savings Plans.

To use APIs to purchase Savings Plans, see the Savings Plans API reference CreateSavingsPlan.

Related information

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

Compute Savings Plans and Reserved Instances

Understanding your Savings Plans recommendations