Original research
3,846 priced Reserved Instance offers across 92 instance types, 16 regions, and three AWS services: Amazon RDS, ElastiCache, and EC2. Read straight from AWS's own Price List API, data as of Aug 27, 2026. Not a quote; verify in the AWS console before you buy.
Key findings
Term length
56%
Committing for three years instead of one buys a meaningfully deeper discount, and that holds across every service in this catalog: RDS, ElastiCache, and EC2 alike.
A fleet that's going to keep running for years is giving up real savings by defaulting to the shorter term out of caution.
The cautious term
36%
A shorter commitment is the safer bet for a fleet that might resize or retire soon, and it still locks in a real discount against paying on-demand rates the whole time.
Every reservation term is worth pricing out. The only question is how much certainty you're willing to trade for the deeper of the two discounts.
A gap in the matrix
0 of 1840
Every RDS record in this catalog was checked against AWS's own price list, across every region and engine tracked here, and that combination never turns up. ElastiCache and EC2 both offer it.
Budgeting for a cash-free, three-year RDS commitment isn't a planning gap to close. AWS never offered that purchase option in the first place.
Payment option
87%–91%
Where AWS does sell a three-year Reserved Instance with no money down, its discount sits close behind the fully prepaid version of the same offer. Cash up front buys a further edge, not a doubling of the saving.
A team that can't stomach a large upfront payment isn't giving up the bulk of the discount by choosing not to pay one.
Which lever matters more
20 vs 6 pts
Stretching a commitment from one year to three shifts the discount by a wide margin. Switching from no money down to paying it all in full moves the number by comparison, but nowhere near as far.
Anyone agonizing over the payment-option dropdown is tuning the smaller lever. Term length is where the decision that actually matters lives.
Region matters
up to 16 pts
Across the regions this catalog tracks, most instance types see only a narrow gap between their best and worst regional discount, but the outliers move far more than that, on the exact same class, engine, and deployment option.
A discount quoted for one region isn't a safe stand-in for another; the region a fleet actually runs in belongs in the math, not left as an afterthought.
The discount table
Median best discount per cell, the deepest offer AWS actually sells at that term and payment option, for that service, across this catalog. A cell marked not offered is a combination AWS doesn't sell at all, not a rounding artifact.
| Service | 1yr No Upfront | 1yr Partial Upfront | 1yr All Upfront | 3yr No Upfront | 3yr Partial Upfront | 3yr All Upfront |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Amazon RDS | 32% | 35% | 36% | not offered | 55% | 56% |
| Amazon ElastiCache | 32% | 35% | 36% | 48% | 52% | 55% |
| Amazon EC2 | 34% | 37% | 38% | 53% | 57% | 59% |
What a lapse costs
The median reservation in this catalog is worth $1,484 a year, or $0.17 an hour. Multiply that across a fleet, and a lapse of any length has a real price.
| Reservations | Per hour | Per day | Per week | 30-day lapse | Fits |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | $0.17 | $4 | $28 | $122 | Fits startups → |
| 5 | $0.85 | $20 | $142 | $610 | Fits startups → |
| 10 | $1.69 | $41 | $285 | $1,220 | Fits startups → |
| 50 | $8.47 | $203 | $1,423 | $6,099 | Fits growth teams → |
| 500 | $84.71 | $2,033 | $14,232 | $60,995 | Fits enterprise → |
| 5,000 | $847.15 | $20,332 | $142,321 | $609,947 | Fits enterprise → |
What it means at your size
Startups
1–10 reservations · a single account
Priced on Watch
Free, forever. There's no break-even to clear.
See the startups fit →Growth teams
dozens of reservations · a few accounts
Priced on Autopilot, $149/mo
Pays for itself by catching one 30-day lapse across 15 median reservations.
See the growth teams fit →Enterprise
hundreds to thousands · many AWS accounts & orgs
Priced on Scale, $499/mo
Pays for itself by catching one 30-day lapse across 50 median reservations.
See the enterprise fit →Method & data
Every figure above is computed from 3,846 priced Reserved Instance offers: 1840 Amazon RDS, 576 Amazon ElastiCache, and 1430 Amazon EC2, spanning 92 instance types across 16 AWS regions. Each service was read from AWS's own price list on its own date:
Savings Plans, Amazon OpenSearch and Redshift reservations, and every cloud besides AWS sit outside this catalog's scope: different commitment shapes and different price lists, none of which this dataset touches.
The pipeline that produced this dataset is committed alongside it. Run node scripts/fetch-prices.mjs against the same AWS Price List API to regenerate it yourself.
These are dataset-wide statistics meant to illustrate how the discount behaves, not a quote for any specific purchase. Confirm the exact rate for any instance type, region, and engine combination in the AWS console before buying.
Download the data
Two files. The CSV holds every priced offer. The JSON holds the computed index shown above.
CSV · the full evidence
Download ri-discount-index.csv →JSON · the computed index
Download ri-discount-index.json →| Column | What it holds |
|---|---|
| service | AWS service: rds, elasticache, or ec2. |
| instance_type | AWS instance type, for example db.r6g.xlarge. |
| region | AWS region code, for example us-east-1. |
| engine | Database or cache engine. Empty for EC2 rows. |
| platform | Operating system. Empty for RDS and ElastiCache rows. |
| deployment | Single-AZ or Multi-AZ. RDS rows only. |
| offering_class | standard or convertible. |
| vcpu | Virtual CPU count. |
| memory | Memory size, as AWS states it. |
| current_generation | true if AWS still sells this generation. |
| term_years | Reservation term in years: 1 or 3. |
| payment_option | No Upfront, Partial Upfront, or All Upfront. |
| on_demand_hourly_usd | On-demand hourly rate, in US dollars. |
| ri_hourly_usd | Reserved Instance hourly rate for the rest of the term. |
| ri_upfront_usd | Reserved Instance upfront payment, paid once. |
| effective_hourly_usd | The upfront amortized into one hourly rate. |
| discount_pct | Percent off on-demand, at the effective hourly rate. |
| annual_saving_usd | What this offer saves per year against on-demand. |
| price_list_publication_date | The date AWS published this row's service price list. |
Data as of Aug 27, 2026. Reserver publishes the compiled statistics under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. Credit Reserver when you reuse them. The underlying prices are AWS's own public list prices. AWS owns them. This file is a compiled reference, not a quote.
Cite this
Copy the line below. It's the whole citation.
Reserver, "The RI Discount Index" (reserver.io/reserved-instance-discount-index), AWS Price List data as of Aug 27, 2026.More free tools
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