Definition
AWS Savings Plan: A 1 or 3 year commitment to a fixed dollar amount of compute spend per hour. AWS applies an automatic discount to matching usage. Three flavors: Compute Savings Plan (broadest, covers EC2, Fargate, Lambda across all regions and families), EC2 Instance Savings Plan (locks family and region), SageMaker Savings Plan (covers SageMaker training and inference). Sits alongside Reserved Instances and AWS EDP commitments.
The commitment is denominated in dollars per hour, not in units of capacity. A 10 dollar per hour Compute Savings Plan applies the discount to the first 10 dollars of qualifying compute usage in any hour. Usage above the commitment runs at the on demand rate. Usage below the commitment still bills the commitment amount, so over commitment burns dollars. This is the central modeling problem in Savings Plan portfolio design.
Plans cannot be cancelled, sold on a marketplace, or transferred. They are pure commitment debt for the term. For this reason, mature FinOps programs run a stepped commitment ladder, layering 1 year No Upfront plans on top of 3 year All Upfront plans to manage downside if workloads shrink. Convertible RIs are the only equivalent flexibility lever and they come with a discount penalty.
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We benchmark commitment coverage, utilization, and effective discount realization across 240 enterprise AWS accounts. Send the plan inventory and we return optimization intelligence in 48 hours.
Discount benchmark by flavor
From our 2024 and 2025 sample of enterprise AWS accounts: 1 year No Upfront Compute Savings Plans ran 27 to 39 percent off on demand. 1 year All Upfront Compute Savings Plans ran 33 to 45 percent. 3 year No Upfront ran 45 to 58 percent. 3 year All Upfront reached 50 to 64 percent. EC2 Instance Savings Plans added 2 to 6 percentage points on top of the equivalent Compute plan but locked the instance family. SageMaker Savings Plans returned 56 to 64 percent at 3 year All Upfront. Methodology: NDA invoice data, deal size brackets 500K to 80M annually.
For the surrounding vocabulary, see the Reserved Instance definition, the spot instance definition, the consumption based pricing definition, and the glossary hub. For AWS benchmarks, see the cloud infrastructure benchmarks and the AWS pricing profile.
Frequently asked questions
What is an AWS Savings Plan?
An AWS Savings Plan is a 1 or 3 year commitment to a fixed dollar per hour of compute spend. In exchange, AWS applies a 27 to 66 percent discount to matching EC2, Fargate, Lambda, and SageMaker usage. Plans come in three flavors: Compute, EC2 Instance, and SageMaker.
Savings Plan versus Reserved Instance, what is the difference?
Savings Plans commit to dollars per hour. Reserved Instances commit to a specific instance family, region, and capacity. Savings Plans cover EC2, Fargate, and Lambda. RIs cover those plus RDS, ElastiCache, Redshift, and OpenSearch. Most enterprise accounts run both.
How much do Savings Plans save?
From 240 enterprise AWS accounts benchmarked in 2024 and 2025, 1 year No Upfront Compute Savings Plans returned 27 to 39 percent off on demand. 3 year All Upfront Compute Savings Plans returned 50 to 64 percent.
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