What are Savings Plans?

Savings Plans offer a flexible pricing model that provides savings on AWS usage. You can save up to 72 percent on your AWS compute workloads. Compute Savings Plans provide lower prices on Amazon EC2 instance usage regardless of instance family, size, OS, tenancy, or AWS Region. This also applies to AWS Fargate and AWS Lambda usage. SageMaker Savings Plans provide you with lower prices for your Amazon SageMaker instance usage, regardless of your instance family, size, component, or AWS Region.

Savings Plans provide savings beyond On-Demand rates in exchange for a commitment of using a specified amount of compute power (measured per hour) for a one or three year period.

• One year: A year is defined as 365 days (31,536,000 seconds).

• Three years: Three years is defined as 1,095 days (94,608,000 seconds).

You can manage your plans by using recommendations, performance reporting, and budget alerts in AWS Cost Explorer.

When you sign up for Savings Plans, the prices you'll pay for usage stays the same through the plan term. You can pay for your commitment using All upfront, Partial upfront, or No upfront payment options.

To get started, use AWS Cost Explorer to view your recommended Savings Plans commitment, refresh Savings Plans recommendations, purchase Savings Plans, manage your Savings Plans, and view your historical AWS usage. These recommendations make it easy for you to know the optimal Savings Plans commitment level for you. You can customize the recommendation to meet your needs and then purchase your Savings Plan. To see a full list of AWS services that are eligible for Savings Plans, see Working with supported services.

Plan types

• Compute Savings Plans provide the most flexibility and prices that are up to 66 percent off of On-Demand rates. These plans automatically apply to your EC2 instance usage, regardless of instance family (for example, m5, c5, etc.), instance sizes (for example, c5.large, c5.xlarge, etc.), Region (for example, us-east-1, us-east-2, etc.), operating system (for example, Windows, Linux, etc.), or tenancy (for example, Dedicated, default, Dedicated Host). They also apply to your Fargate and Lambda usage. With Compute Savings Plans, you can move a workload from C5 to M5, shift your usage from EU (Ireland) to EU (London), or migrate your application from Amazon EC2 to Amazon ECS using Fargate at any time. You can continue to benefit from the low prices provided by Compute Savings Plans as you make these changes.

• EC2 Instance Savings Plans provide savings up to 72 percent off On-Demand, in exchange for a commitment to a specific instance family in a chosen AWS Region (for example, M5 in Virginia). These plans automatically apply to usage regardless of size (for example, m5.xlarge, m5.2xlarge, etc.), OS (for example, Windows, Linux, etc.), and tenancy (Host, Dedicated, Default) within the specified family in a Region.

  With an EC2 Instance Savings Plan, you can change your instance size within the instance family (for example, from c5.xlarge to c5.2xlarge) or the operating system (for example, from Windows to Linux), or move from Dedicated tenancy to Default and continue to receive the discounted rate provided by your EC2 Instance Savings Plan.

• SageMaker Savings Plans provide savings up to 64 percent off of On-Demand rates. These plans automatically apply to your SageMaker instance usage regardless of instance family (for example, ml.m5, ml.c5, etc.), instance sizes (for example ml.c5.large, ml.c5.xlarge, etc.), Region (for example, us-east-1, us-east-2, etc.), and component (for example, Notebook, Training, etc.).

  With SageMaker Savings Plans, you can move a workload from ml.c5 to ml.m5, shift your usage from Europe (Ireland) to Europe (London), or migrate your usage from Training to Inference at any time and continue to receive benefits.

  Note

  Savings Plans provides low prices in exchange for commitment. The terms of the commitment can't be changed after purchase. As your usage changes, you can sign up for additional Savings Plans.

  Dedicated Instances are charged $2/hour in every Region you have at least one Dedicated Instance running. These dedicated fees are not discounted by Savings Plans.

  Both Compute and EC2 Instance plan types apply to EC2 instances that are a part of Amazon EMR, Amazon EKS, and Amazon ECS clusters. Amazon EKS charges will not be covered by Savings Plans, but the underlying EC2 instances will be.

Compute Savings Plans and Reserved Instances

Compute Savings Plans are a flexible pricing model that offers low prices, just like Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances (RI), but with added flexibility. With Savings Plans, you can reduce your bill by committing to a consistent amount of compute usage (measured in $/hour), instead of specific instance configurations. Savings Plans give you the flexibility to use the compute option that best suits your needs at low prices, without having to perform exchanges or modifications.

Compute Savings Plans provide savings up to 66 percent off On-Demand, similar to Convertible RIs. Compute Savings Plans automatically reduce your cost on EC2 instance usage, Fargate, and Lambda. EC2 Instance Savings Plans offer savings up to 72 percent off of On-Demand, similar to Standard RIs. They also automatically save you money on any instance usage within a given EC2 instance family in your Region of choice. For more information, see Plan types.

Comparing Savings Plans and RIs
	Compute Savings Plans	EC2 Instance Savings Plans	Convertible RIs*	Standard RIs
Savings over On-Demand	Up to 66 percent	Up to 72 percent	Up to 72 percent	Up to 72 percent
Lower price in exchange for monetary commitment	✓	✓	—	—
Automatically applies pricing to any instance family	✓	—	—	—
Automatically applies pricing to any instance size	✓	✓	—**	—**
Automatically applies pricing to any Tenancy or OS	✓	✓	—	—
Automatically applies to Amazon ECS and Amazon EKS using Fargate	✓	—	—	—
Automatically applies to Lambda	✓	—	—	—
Automatically applies pricing across AWS Regions	✓	—	—	—
Term length options of 1 or 3 years	✓	✓	✓	✓

* Convertible RIs can be changed across instance families, sizes, OS, and tenancy, but requires you to manually perform exchanges.

** Regional convertible RIs and Regional standard RIs provide instance size flexibility.

Note

Savings Plans doesn't provide capacity reservations, but you can allocate On-Demand Capacity Reservation (ODCR) for your needs and your Savings Plans will apply.

Savings Plans prices for instances running SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) are different compared to the corresponding RI price.

Savings Plans prices do not change based on the amount of hourly commitment.

Savings Plans doesn't apply to spot usage or usage covered by RIs.

Savings Plans offer lower prices compared to On-Demand pricing in exchange for a commitment, and can't be cancelled during the term.