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What Is a Savings Plan? AWS Commitment Pricing, Explained

A Savings Plan is an AWS pricing agreement: commit to a fixed hourly compute spend for one or three years and pay up to 72 percent less than on-demand.

Erik LoydMay 12, 20262 min read

Savings Plan

A Savings Plan is an AWS pricing agreement: commit to a fixed hourly compute spend for one or three years and pay up to 72 percent less than on-demand.

Related termsreserved instance

A Savings Plan is a commitment, not a reservation. You promise AWS a fixed amount of compute spending per hour, for example $10 an hour for one year, and in exchange every dollar of eligible usage that falls under that commitment is billed at a discounted rate instead of the on-demand rate. Anything above the commitment simply bills at on-demand.

The three flavors

Compute Savings Plans are the flexible kind: the discount applies across EC2 (any family, size, region, or OS), Fargate, and Lambda, with discounts up to 66 percent. Flexibility costs a few points of discount, but the plan survives instance-family migrations and region moves.
EC2 Instance Savings Plans commit to one instance family in one region, for example m7i in us-east-1, and reach up to 72 percent. Within the family you keep size, OS, and tenancy flexibility. Best when a workload's home is stable.
SageMaker Savings Plans cover SageMaker compute separately, up to 64 percent.

How the discount actually applies

Every hour, AWS takes your eligible usage, sorts it by discount rate, and applies the commitment to the usage with the largest savings first, until the committed dollars are used up. You pay the committed amount whether or not usage fills it, which is why the sizing question is the whole game: the commitment should sit at your usage floor, the level your compute never drops below, not at your average.

Savings Plan or Reserved Instance?

They share discount economics; the practical difference is what you lock. A Reserved Instance locks instance attributes and can be sold on the marketplace if plans change; a Savings Plan locks dollars per hour and follows your usage wherever it moves within scope. For most compute-heavy accounts today, Savings Plans are the default and RIs remain the tool for databases and specialized capacity. The full purchase-by-purchase breakdown is in our Reserved Instances vs Savings Plans comparison.
Sizing, coverage targets, and the mistakes that lead to regret are covered across our commitments research.
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