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Pages

Every page on the site.

  • Home

    Reserver matches Reserved Instances to your running fleet and tells you what to buy next.

  • Waitlist

    Join the waitlist. Reserver is in early access.

  • Guides

    Every Reserved Instance guide and playbook, listed on one page.

  • Free tools

    Seven free tools. Nothing you paste ever leaves your browser.

  • Who it's for

    Reserved Instance management for startups, growth teams, and enterprise.

  • Case studies

    Real AWS accounts, with every dollar measured and shown.

  • Product tour

    Connect an account, see it scanned end to end.

  • Features

    Every capability, one page.

  • How it works

    Connect, scan, match, recommend, buy.

  • What we cover

    RDS, ElastiCache, and EC2 in one map.

  • Amazon RDS

    Up to 69% off, matched to what's running.

  • Amazon ElastiCache

    Up to 56% off, matched to what's running.

  • Amazon EC2

    Up to 72% off, matched to what's running.

  • Security

    Read-only by default; automation is opt-in.

  • Security review pack

    Every question a security review asks, answered in one place.

  • Privacy

    What we collect, and what we don't.

  • Roadmap

    What's live today, and what's next.

  • Compare

    See Reserver against the alternatives, side by side.

  • vs AWS Cost Explorer

    Reserver vs AWS Cost Explorer, sourced from AWS Cost Explorer's own site.

  • vs ProsperOps

    Reserver vs ProsperOps, sourced from ProsperOps's own site.

  • vs Archera

    Reserver vs Archera, sourced from Archera's own site.

  • vs nOps

    Reserver vs nOps, sourced from nOps's own site.

  • Coverage Check

    What are you not reserving?

  • Expiry Check

    Your real renewal calendar. Right now.

  • Savings Calculator

    What Reserved Instances are worth to you.

  • Renewal Exposure

    What a missed renewal costs your whole fleet.

  • Business Case

    Something to send to whoever signs.

  • Size Flexibility

    One reservation of this size covers what, exactly?

  • Term Check

    One year or three? Upfront, or not?

  • Startups

    1–10 reservations, all in one AWS account

  • Growth teams

    Dozens of reservations spread across a handful of AWS accounts

  • Enterprise

    Hundreds to thousands of reservations across many AWS accounts and teams

  • Platform teams

    You hold the IAM role everything else in this fleet depends on

  • FinOps leads

    You report a coverage or Effective Savings Rate number to someone above you

  • Finance

    You need the payback period before you approve a new line item

  • Startup case study

    One missed renewal, one never-reserved tier, both quantified.

  • Growth case study

    The money leaked in the seams between manual reviews, not to ignorance.

  • Enterprise case study

    The size where every account looks fine alone, and the money hides in the seams between them.

  • RI Price Library

    Real AWS Price List figures, one page per instance type.

  • Amazon RDS prices

    Every Amazon RDS instance type, priced.

  • Amazon ElastiCache prices

    Every Amazon ElastiCache instance type, priced.

  • Amazon EC2 prices

    Every Amazon EC2 instance type, priced.

  • Prices by region

    Compare the on-demand premium across 16 AWS regions.

  • The RI Discount Index

    Original research: what Reserved Instances actually discount, by term, payment option, and region.

  • Answers

    Direct answers to common questions.

  • Glossary

    Plain-language definitions of every reservation term.

  • Pricing

Answers

Every question the site answers, matched by question and summary.

Glossary

Every glossary term, matched by name and definition.

  • Reserved Instance (RI)

    A 1- or 3-year commitment to a specific instance configuration, in exchange for a discount off the on-demand rate for matching usage.

  • On-Demand

    The standard pay-as-you-go rate, charged on any usage with no matching reservation.

  • Standard RI

    The Reserved Instance type that fixes its instance attributes for the whole term, in exchange for the deepest available discount.

  • Convertible RI

    An EC2-only Reserved Instance that can be exchanged into a different family, size, OS, or tenancy mid-term, at a shallower discount than Standard.

  • Term (1-year / 3-year)

    The length of the commitment, 1 or 3 years, and the single biggest lever on how deep the discount goes.

  • Payment option

    How much of the term's cost is paid upfront: No, Partial, or All Upfront, trading cash now for a deeper discount.

  • Effective hourly rate

    The true hourly cost of a reservation once any upfront payment is amortized across the whole term.

  • Break-even

    The day an upfront reservation cost catches up to what on-demand usage would have cost over the same period, with every day after pure savings.

  • Instance family & class

    The specific hardware shape a reservation is bound to, e.g. db.r6g.xlarge, the first thing that has to match for a discount to apply.

  • Size flexibility (normalization factor)

    A Reserved Instance feature that lets one reservation's discount apply proportionally across different sizes within the same instance family.

  • Previous-generation family

    An instance family AWS has replaced with a newer, usually cheaper family, such as m5 superseded by m8g.

  • Regional vs Zonal RI

    Whether a reservation's capacity applies anywhere in a region (Regional) or is pinned to one Availability Zone (Zonal).

  • Scope

    The region or Availability Zone a reservation's discount is bound to.

  • Platform / engine

    The operating system (EC2) or database engine (RDS) a reservation is bound to, alongside instance class and region.

  • Coverage

    The % of reservable running capacity currently matched to a reservation you own.

  • Utilization

    The % of a reservation's own capacity that's actually being claimed by matching running usage.

  • Reservable usage

    The slice of running usage that's actually eligible to be matched to a reservation, the denominator coverage is measured against.

  • On-demand premium

    The extra you pay, per hour, on reservable usage that isn't currently covered by a reservation.

  • Blended rate

    The average effective rate across a mix of on-demand and reserved usage for the same instance class.

  • On-demand-equivalent cost (ODE)

    What your fleet's usage would cost with nothing reserved, the baseline every savings percentage is measured against.

  • Amortized cost

    What you actually pay once every reservation's upfront and hourly cost is spread evenly across its term.

  • Effective Savings Rate (ESR)

    The % saved off on-demand-equivalent cost once coverage, discount depth, and utilization are all priced in, the FinOps industry's standard output metric for rate optimization.

  • Term end / expiry

    The moment a reservation's 1- or 3-year commitment ends and its discount stops applying.

  • Renewal

    Buying a new reservation to replace one that's ending, a manual, deliberate purchase, since AWS has no auto-renew for RIs.

  • Renewal cliff

    The silent jump from a reservation's discounted rate to the full on-demand rate the instant its term ends unrenewed.

  • Modification / exchange

    The two ways to change a reservation mid-term: modification adjusts a few attributes on a Standard RI; exchange swaps a Convertible RI for a different one entirely.

  • RI Marketplace

    AWS's resale market for the unused portion of an EC2 Standard RI's term, the one way to exit a reservation early instead of letting it sit unused.

  • Queued purchase

    A Reserved Instance or Savings Plan purchase you schedule ahead, which AWS completes on the date you set if the price hasn't changed.

  • Compute Savings Plan

    A spend-based commitment (dollars/hour) that discounts EC2, Fargate, and Lambda usage automatically, regardless of instance family or region.

  • EC2 Instance Savings Plan

    A narrower Savings Plan variant: a spend commitment to one instance family in one region, with a discount depth closer to a Standard RI's.

  • Reserved DB instance (RDS)

    The Reserved Instance for Amazon RDS, the same 1-/3-year, discount-for-commitment mechanics as EC2, applied to a database engine and deployment option instead of an OS.

  • Reserved node (ElastiCache)

    The Reserved Instance for Amazon ElastiCache, the same commitment mechanics, applied to a cache node type, with a lower published discount ceiling than EC2 or RDS.

  • Discount sharing

    AWS's default behavior of applying a Reserved Instance or Savings Plans discount to any account on the same consolidated bill, not just the account that bought it.

  • Payer account

    The account in an AWS Organization's consolidated bill that every member account's usage and Reserved Instance discounts roll up into.

Guides

Every long-form guide, matched by title and summary.

  • The AWS Reserved Instance renewal playbook

    The biggest, most boring discount in cloud has one silent failure mode: it doesn't renew itself. Here's what an RI actually is, why the renewal cliff catches even disciplined teams, and how to stop it happening to you.

  • The Reserved Instance coverage playbook

    Reserved Instances only save money if they're covering something real, and covering everything isn't the goal either. How to measure coverage, set a target, and keep it honest as your fleet grows from a handful of reservations to thousands.

  • The AWS Reserved Instance savings playbook

    Every Reserved Instance is the same bet: pay some or all of it now for a lower rate later. Here's how term and payment option change that bet, how to read break-even, and why running the math pays for itself at any fleet size.

  • Reserved Instances vs Savings Plans

    Two different commitments, both sold as "reservations." Here's exactly what an RI locks in versus what a Savings Plan locks in, an honest head-to-head, and why the renewal cliff catches both the same way.

  • Effective Savings Rate, explained

    Coverage tells you what's reserved. ESR tells you what it's worth. Here's the formula, why two fleets can share a coverage number and a wildly different ESR, and why a renewal lapse, priced in the industry's own metric, pays for Reserver by itself.

  • The Reserved Instance renewal ladder

    A reservation's term ends on the clock, not the calendar, and if too many end in the same week or month, one missed renewal turns into several. What expiry concentration is, the target FinOps teams ladder against, and what to do about a fleet that's already clustered.

  • What each cloud does at term end

    A habit learned on Azure is exactly backwards on AWS. Here's what each cloud actually does when a commitment discount's term ends, verified against each vendor's own documentation, and what the gap costs a fleet running all three.

  • How AWS shares a Reserved Instance discount

    AWS shares a reservation's discount with every account on the same consolidated bill, by default. What that means for a two-account startup and an AWS Organization with thousands of reservations, and why the account that benefits is often not the account that has to renew.

  • Queue an AWS Reserved Instance purchase

    AWS can queue an EC2 Reserved Instance purchase years ahead, but the console only lands it on a UTC midnight, and RDS and ElastiCache cannot be queued at all. What that costs in real hours, and why it matters more the more reservations you run.

  • Reserved Instances and old-generation hardware

    AWS retires an instance family long before most Reserved Instance terms end. An EC2 Convertible RI can follow. A Standard RI, an RDS reservation, and an ElastiCache reservation cannot. What that costs, and how to see it coming across thousands of reservations.

  • Reserved Instance coverage drift

    A term that ends at least ends. Coverage drift does not. A reservation stops matching the instance it was bought for, and nothing in AWS raises an alert. The three causes, the seven dimensions behind them, and what one drifted reservation costs at 30, 90, and 180 days.

  • AWS caps how many Reserved Instances you can buy

    Reserving 300 EC2 instances in one Region does not happen in one month. AWS caps new Reserved Instance purchases at 20 per Region and 20 per zone, counts instances not orders, and can block the purchase from paying off at all. RDS and ElastiCache cap reservations a different way.

  • Check for idle capacity before you reserve it

    A Reserved Instance is a bet that an instance keeps running the way it runs today. Get that wrong, and the term still runs its course. What a commitment locks in per service, what Reserver checks before you buy, and the one rule it will not break: no signal is never read as idle.

Instance prices

Every priced instance type, matched by name, family, and service.

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