Understanding rates, discounts, and purchase commitments - Amazon Cost Management
Before discount ratesAfter discount ratesPurchase commitments
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Understanding rates, discounts, and purchase commitments

This section outlines Amazon rates, discounts, and commitments supported by Pricing Calculator and how they apply to both workload and bill estimate types. Before discount and after discount rates only apply to workload estimates. Bill estimate considers your own rates based on your existing usage and commitments, other discounts, and credits. Your choice of a rate type does not impact the bill estimate calculation.

Topics

Before discount rates

The before discount rates refer to the public, On-Demand pricing for Amazon services, without any discounts or commitments applied. These are the standard rates that are available to any Amazon customer.

The before discount rates can be helpful in the following use cases:

  • If you're a new Amazon customer without any discounts or commitments, the before discount rates accurately represent the pricing you would pay for On-Demand usage.

  • When estimating the cost of using a new Amazon service or feature that you don't currently have discounts for, the before discount rates provide a baseline cost comparison.

Note

  • Before discount rates don’t take into account any discounts or commitments that you may be eligible for as an existing Amazon customer.

  • If you are using before discount rates, tiered pricing is only accounted for if the modeled usage crosses a tier of usage. For example, if you want to model 100TB/month of S3 standard storage use, Pricing Calculator uses tiered S3 standard rates for the first 50 TB/Month and the next tiered rate for the remaining 50 TB/Month.

After discount rates

After discount rates refer to what you pay for Amazon services, after applying any pricing discounts you have with Amazon. These rates can help you estimate your actual Amazon costs, taking the following into account:

  • Your organization's volume or pricing discounts.

  • Tiered pricing based on your usage volumes. Tiered pricing is only accounted for if the modeled usage crosses a tier of usage. For example, if you want to model 100TB/month of S3 standard storage use, Pricing Calculator uses tiered S3 standard rates for the first 50 TB/Month and the next tiered rate for the remaining 50 TB/Month.

    Note

    If you are using after discount rates, then a single rate is used based on your highest usage tier for that product SKU as of the last completed anniversary bill.

After discount rates are the increase in cost for using one additional unit of a SKU, considering all applicable discounts at the consolidated billing family level. For SKUs that you used last month, the effective rate is the net unblended rate of the SKUs in the Cost and Usage Report. For SKUs that you have not yet used, we will construct mock workloads by adding one unit of usage for each of the SKUs on top of prior month's usage, and get the rates from the resulting anniversary bill output.

If you have any purchase commitments (Savings Plans or Reservations), the calculated after discount rate will not be affected by the commitment discount. This means that the after discount rate we use is based solely on your actual usage based on On-Demand usage rates and applicable discounts, such as tiering discounts, volume discounts, but not commitment discounts.

The following diagram illustrates how a rate is applied to the usage input in a workload estimate. A workload estimate identifies the correct rate to be applied to the units of usage you have modeled in the estimate. To identify the correct rate, the workload estimate looks up rates based on usage attainment for the modeled product (as defined by the product’s SKU) as of your last completed bill. For more information about SKUs, see Product details in the Amazon Data Exports User Guide.

Usage input in a workload estimate

After discount rates give you cost estimates that are tailored to your specific Amazon pricing terms. This can help you to make informed decisions about how changes to your usage would impact your actual Amazon spend. Workload estimates are available immediately upon running the estimate.

Note

  • After discount rates don't include the impact of active commitments, such as Savings Plans and Reserved Instances. The calculator assumes you don't have any unused commitments that may be applied to the estimate. The estimated cost might be larger than your actual spend if you have unused commitments that can be applied to your usage.

  • For accounts opting in to Cost Explorer, after discount rates will become available for use within 72-90 hours of enabling Cost Explorer.

  • Your most recent after discount rates are calculated based on the last completed anniversary bill month and are available by the 11th of the current month.

  • After discounts aren't available to any product launched after the 11th of the current month. In this case, the after discount rates will become available on 11th of the following month.

Purchase commitments

The purchase commitments supported by Amazon Pricing Calculator are Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances (RIs) and Compute and EC2 Instance Savings Plans. For more information, see Compute and EC2 Instance Savings Plans and Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances.

You can use Pricing Calculator to model the impact of adding new Savings Plans or Reserved Instances, or removing existing commitments as part of a bill scenario. This allows you to see how these commitments would affect your overall estimated Amazon costs.