What should I consider before purchasing a Savings Plan?

Resolution

Consider the following when deciding if Savings Plans are right for you.

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 option doesn't require any upfront payment. Your commitment will be charged on a monthly basis.
• Partial Upfront option requires at least half of your payment upfront. The remaining is charged on a monthly basis.
• All Upfront option offers the lowest prices. Your entire commitment is charged in one payment.

If your 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

Savings Plans can't be modified or canceled. You can increase your hourly commitment by purchasing additional Savings Plans. You can queue your Savings Plan 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, like Reserved Instances, are limited to the account that purchases them. They can't be transferred across accounts, but benefits that are purchased through AWS Organizations can be shared within that organization.

Capacity reservations and short-term discounts

• Savings Plans don't provide a Capacity Reservation. If you're interested in the capacity reservation but not Savings Plans, then you might want to use On-Demand Capacity Reservations.
• For short-term discounts on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, consider launching a Spot Instance instead.

Pricing and purchasing a Savings Plan

For pricing information for Savings Plans, see Compute Savings Plans and Machine Learning Savings Plans.

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

To purchase Savings Plans using APIs, see Savings Plans API Reference.

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