Reserved Instance and Savings Plan coverage
Steady workloads paying on-demand rates are the most expensive waste in an AWS account — and the most invisible, because nothing is broken.
What this problem is
AWS charges a real premium for flexibility. On-demand pricing exists for people who do not know how much they will use; those who do know, and commit to a volume for one or three years, pay substantially less for the identical resource. Reserved Instances and Savings Plans are the two shapes that commitment takes.
What sets this apart from every other line in a report is that nothing here is surplus. The instances are in use, the load is real, the resource is needed. The waste is in paying a flexibility premium for a workload that does not vary — a server that has run continuously for two years needs no flexibility at all.
It is also the finding that most requires a human decision. A commitment is a contract: it genuinely saves money, and it genuinely locks you in. So this one enters the report as a decision to make, with the estimated return, rather than as a command to run.
How we detect it
We read the account's compute spend from Cost Explorer with GetCostAndUsage, and existing reservation and plan coverage with GetReservationCoverage and GetSavingsPlansCoverage. The gap between the steady baseline and what is already covered is what reaches the report.
- On-demand compute without a commitment
What it costs
The discount depends on term and commitment type: one-year commitments typically land in the 20–40% range against on-demand, and three-year terms go higher. The exact figure varies by instance family and region.
Public AWS list prices, us-east-1, subject to change. The figure in your report is computed against your resources in your regions.
How it appears in the report
An illustrative example, with invented resources and figures. In the report each finding carries the real resource, its region, and the fix command where a safe one exists.
Does your account have this?
The scan is read-only and shows you what it found before you pay for anything.
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