Purchase Options: On-Demand, Reserved, Spot, Savings Plans
~14 min read
Four ways to pay for the same EC2 capacity, trading commitment and interruption risk for discount.
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Key points
- •On-Demand: no commitment, standard rate, best for unpredictable/short-term usage
- •Reserved Instances: 1-3 year commitment to a specific config, 30-60%+ discount, less flexible
- •Savings Plans: 1-3 year $/hour spend commitment, applies flexibly across instance types (and Lambda/Fargate for Compute Savings Plans) — the modern recommended default
- •Spot Instances: 60-90% discount on spare capacity, reclaimable with ~2 minutes notice — only for interruption-tolerant workloads