Purchase Analyzer

Purchase Analyzer is based on the concept of analyzing eligible cloud usage over time and estimating how it would be covered by Savings Plans.

It allows you to:

The analysis is based on:

Suggestions and Purchase Analyzer answer different questions. Suggestions asks which of these commitments should I buy and lists them one by one. Purchase Analyzer asks if I take one plan covering everything, how big should it be.

Compute Savings Plan

Covers compute services such as:

Applies across regions and instance types and suitable for general compute workloads.

Database Savings Plan

Covers AWS managed database services, including:

Suitable for database workloads.

For more details, see AWS documentation: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/introducing-database-savings-plans-for-aws-databases/

Note: Database Savings Plans support only the No upfront payment option and are available for a 1-year term only. The other payment options stay visible in the selector but cannot be chosen while the Database card is active, and the results carry a single one-year card instead of two.

Only one plan card is active at a time. Switching the card clears the results produced for the other plan, so a compute recommendation is never left on screen as a database one.

The page opens with the Compute Savings Plan card active, No upfront payment, a 7 days lookback period and both commitment exclusions enabled. No results are shown until you run an analysis.

Set up your analysis parameters. The scope is chosen in the page header; the rest of the parameters sit in the page body.

Account scope

Payment Option

The more you pay in advance, the deeper the discount, so the same commitment costs less in total.

Lookback Period

A short window follows recent behaviour closely; a longer one smooths out short spikes and seasonal noise.

Exclude Commitments

You can exclude existing commitments from the analysis:

When selected, these commitments will not be included in the analysis. Both are enabled by default.

Click on the Run analysis button after setup.

The system processes the analysis in stages:

While a run is in flight the configuration controls are locked and a Cancel button appears beside Run analysis. Cancelling drops the run and leaves the page as it was, without a half-finished result on screen.

After completion, the system provides:

Recommended Commitment

The suggested hourly commitment, calculated for a 1-year plan and a 3-year plan.

This figure is the commitment to add to what you already hold, not the total commitment to end up with. If you hold nothing today, the two are the same; if you do, the recommendation tells you how much more to take on. To read it as a monthly amount, multiply the hourly rate by 730, the average number of hours in a month, and add it to your current monthly commitment. The result is the Recommended Commitment figure on the matching card.

Savings Estimation

Estimated monthly savings and the percentage improvement, comparing current against recommended costs.

The saving is Current Total minus Recommended Total. The percentage beside it is taken against Current On-Demand, not against Current Total, so it answers how much of your uncommitted spend the plan removes. Measured against the total, the same saving would look roughly half as large.

Cost Breakdown

Compares commitment, on-demand and total costs.

The Current column is the same on both cards and does not move with the payment option, because the payment option changes what you would take on and not what you already spend. It does change with the lookback period, because its on-demand part is derived from the analysed window while its commitment part is a fixed monthly rate.

Usage Visualization

Charts displaying consumption, covered usage, and potential covered usage (1-year / 3-year). Hover for details, analyze trends, or expand for a larger view.

The four series stack in the same order at every point: covered usage is the smallest, then the one-year potential, then the three-year potential, then consumption. A three-year plan never covers less than a one-year plan at the same recommendation, because the deeper discount buys more coverage for the same spend.

Click the Expand button to view the graph in a larger size. The modal carries the same data and the same tooltip, and closes with its close control or with Escape.

This analysis encompasses both a 1-year and a 3-year timeframe, presenting both scenarios within a unified evaluation.

The results presented are specifically tailored to the filters you have selected and the usage period you have specified, ensuring the analysis is relevant to your particular needs.

Flexibility is a key feature: you retain the ability to modify the parameters used in the analysis and rerun the evaluation at any point, allowing for iterative exploration and refinement of your optimization strategies. When you change a parameter, the previous results stay on screen and a notice beside Run analysis states that the analysis has to be run again. The notice covers scope changes made in the page header as well as changes made in the page body, because the accounts you analyse are part of the configuration. Nothing recalculates without an explicit run, so a figure on screen always belongs to one complete configuration rather than a mixture of two.

By leveraging the Purchase Analyzer, you gain the capacity to: