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Savings Plans

Flexible pricing model that provides savings of up to 72% compared to On-Demand prices.
16 November 2025 by
Tony FinOps

Savings Plans…

  • Is a flexible pricing model that provides savings of up to 72% compared to On-Demand prices.

  • Includes Compute SPs, EC2 Instance SPs and SageMaker SPs.

  • Offers significant savings in exchange for a commitment to use a specific amount of compute power measured in $/hour.


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Difference between Savings Plans

Feature

AWS Compute Savings Plan

EC2 Instance Savings Plan

SageMaker Savings Plan

Scope

EC2, Lambda, Fargate

EC2

Machine Learning Service

Cost Savings

Up to 66%

Up to 72%

Up to 64%

Flexible Across

Family, Size, Region, OS, Tenancy

Size, OS, Tenancy

Family, Size, Region, OS, Tenancy

Commitment

1 or 3 years

1 or 3 years

 

1 or 3 years

 

Best For

Dynamic, evolving workloads

Predictable EC2 Instance Usage

Machine Learning workflows

  • Compute SPs offer the greatest flexibility.

  • EC2 Instance SPs provide the deepest discounts, but you need to specify a Region and an Instance family (e.g. c5).

Utilization and Coverage Report

Go in Billing Service > Savings and Commitments > Savings Plans.

  • The utilization report shows the percentage of your Savings Plans commitments that you are using across your applicable AWS usage.

  • Ideally, you want this to be at 100% to ensure you are not wasting any of your committed spend.

 

  • The coverage report indicates what percentage of your eligible AWS usage costs are being covered by your SPs during your selected time period.

  • Ideally, you want this to be around 80 to 100% to ensure you are covering most of the potential savings.

Recommendations

Choose your Savings Plans type, term and payment option.
Look at the recommended Savings Plans and lower the recommended Commitment rate.
You do not want to over-commit by having coverage > 100%.


 Purchase a Savings Plan

 

  • Look the uncovered Services In Coverage Report.

  • Confirm your instances are needed and rightsized.
  • Look at recommendations and Compute pricing Savings Plans rate.
  • Purchase the Savings plan : In Billing Service, click on Purchase Savings Plans, Choose a type, term, payment option and hourly commitment (+ Region and Family for EC2 Instance SPs). Click Add to Cart, then Submit order.



 

 

AWS Pricing Models
AWS offers you a pay-as-you-go approach for pricing for the vast majority of our cloud services. You can also make a commitment and receive a significant discount off compute. You can also use Spot Instances to spare EC2 capacity at savings of up to 90% off On-Demand prices. Finally, have a look at AWS Free Tier.