AWS Reserved Instance and Savings Plan Changes for 2026
AWS is making significant updates to its Reserved Instances (RIs) and Savings Plans (SPs) policies, effective June 1, 2025. These changes target Managed Service Providers (MSPs) and resellers, restricting RIs and SPs to a single end customer’s usage. Here’s what you need to know about these updates and how they might impact your commitment strategies.
A Brief History of AWS RIs and SP Policy
Before getting into the most recent key changes, let’s very briefly review the most impactful policy changes Amazon has made over the past few years.
November 2019 — Introduction of Savings Plans: AWS launched Savings Plans as a more flexible alternative to RIs, offering similar discounts with less complexity.
November 2020 — EC2 Instance Savings Plans: AWS introduced EC2 Instance Savings Plans, providing discounts across instance families, operating systems, and tenancies. This offered customers more granular control over their commitments, requiring customers to choose between multiple commitment types and analyze their usage patterns more closely.
September 2020 — Queued Purchases for Savings Plans: AWS introduced the ability to queue purchases of Savings Plans, allowing customers to specify a future time (up to 3 years ahead) to carry out those purchases
August 2020 — Expansion of Savings Plans: AWS extended Savings Plans to cover additional services beyond EC2, including AWS Lambda and AWS Fargate. This expansion allowed customers to optimize costs across a broader range of AWS services with a single commitment.
January 2024 — RI Marketplace Restrictions: AWS implemented a significant policy change by prohibiting Enterprise Discount Program (EDP) customers from selling discounted Reserved Instances on the AWS Marketplace. These changes were designed to reinforce AWS’s long-standing view that RI and SP savings should be allocated directly to individual customers, rather than shared across multiple customers via a reseller’s account
What are the changes AWS is making to Reserved Instances and Savings Plans June 2025?
AWS has announced significant changes to its Reserved Instances (RIs) and Savings Plans (SPs), effective June 1, 2025. These updates primarily impact Managed Service Providers (MSPs) and resellers who currently share RIs and SPs across multiple customer accounts. Under the new policy, RIs and SPs will be restricted to a single end customer’s AWS usage, aligning with AWS’s intent for these commitments to be customer-specific.
Who is impacted by these changes?
The two groups of people who will be most affected by these changes include:
- Resellers of RIs: These include Managed Service Providers, AWS Solution Providers, or AWS Partners who will no longer be able to share RI and SP discounts across multiple end customers. This change effectively eliminates the model where MSPs purchase commitments centrally and distribute savings and flexibility across their customer base.
- End Customers Using MSP Services: Businesses that currently benefit from shared commitments through an MSP will need to transition to direct commitment purchases. They may face potential cost increases if they don’t adapt their commitment strategy.
This means that if your commitments are being managed by an MSP or if you rely on shared commitment pools, you’ll need to devote some time to ensuring your organization’s strategy aligns with the new policy and consider a transition to a new solution.
Luckily, nOps customers are NOT impacted by these changes in any way. Because we don’t rely on shared commitment pools, you retain full control of your commitments, ensure full compliance with AWS policies, and experience absolutely no disruption from this change.
Manage your Reserved Instances and Savings Plans with nOps
nOps helps you optimize Reserved Instances (RIs) and Savings Plans automatically, for greater time and cost savings.
- Maximize Discounts: Achieve 30-60% savings by automatically optimizing your compute.
- 100% Utilization of RI and SP: We guarantee that you’ll use all of your nOps-managed commitments — so you don’t risk any wasted spend.
- Time Savings & Simplicity: It just takes a few minutes to onboard and get started with dynamic, hands-off management of your commitments.
If you’d like help navigating the changes, feel free to contact us. You can test our G2 5-star rated commitment management solution out using your AWS account with a guided onboarding or demo with one of our Commitment Management experts.
More Resources for Reserved Instance and Savings Plan Management
Looking for more info on optimizing your AWS Reserved Instances and Savings Plans? We’ve got you covered — check out:
- Guide to AWS Commitments eBook— with real world use cases, best practices, and advanced strategies for maximizing your RI and SP
- nCast episode 11: “Committing Wisely”— featuring the AWS Optics Team and nOps VP of Engineering James Wilson, learn expert insights into managing AWS commitments effectively
- The Esssential Guide to Savings Plans— everything you ever wanted to know about this AWS pricing discount
- Reserved Instances vs Savings Plans: The Cheat Sheet— a quick reference to understand the differences and make the right choice between RI and SP
- nOps vs ProsperOps vs Zesty— a detailed comparison of the three top Commitment Management solutions in the marketplace
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