AWS (finally) releases Database Savings Plans! What you need to know

Today AWS released region- and product-flexible Database Savings Plans that unlock up to 35% savings on RDS, Aurora, DynamoDB, and more. 

This marks an awesome FinOps milestone, allowing customers flexible savings commitment coverage for some of the most-used AWS services without locking you into multi-year, rigid commitments tied to specific product types, instance families, or regions. 

It's equally exciting to see cloud vendors move more to spend-based flexible commitments that are easier to understand and implement for customers of all sizes and FinOps abilities. AWS has totally transformed commitments with this release, in our opinion, combining many database products into one simple commitment that is easy for customers to understand, optimize, and take advantage of. 

What do these new Savings Plans cover? 

Up to 35% off any/all eligible usage in RDS, Aurora, DynamoDB, Elasticache, DocumentDB, Neptune, Timestream, and DMS. 

Key considerations

The total savings can be a bit smaller for on-demand database workloads that have provisioned capacity already attached to them, such as DynamoDB provision capacity. These workloads will enjoy up to an additional 20% discount (on-top-of provisioned capacity savings) if these programs are stacked together. 

These Savings Plans (SPs) require a 1-year commitment. However North can support flexible managed Database SPs that are month-to-month in commitment flexibility, allowing customers to enjoy great savings while retaining usage variance and general business flexibility. 

Understanding your savings potential

AWS offers a native analyzer tool in Cost Explorer. North also offers similar savings and commitment coverage analysis on our homepage, with a full on-demand and daily cost-by-purchase-type spend data in our Commitments tab.  

Getting started with flexible database SPs in North

No change or update needed on your North app, when you click Available Savings, you will start to see Database Savings Plans coverage suggested in the Available Savings widget on our homepage. This change is scheduled to hit production on December 3, 2025, but we are actively processing flexible Database Savings Plans orders starting December 2.

As always, you can also enable Autopilot to have the coverage change month-to-month to match any on-demand usage changes, ensuring max coverage, no commitment risk or no on-demand spend waste. 

Please reach out to your North account team for any questions. If you're new to North, schedule a call with our team or try our platform for free at app.north.cloud.

For more information from AWS on this commitment, see the AWS announcement here.