June Changes to AWS and GCP Discounts - Usage Customers Not Impacted

This month, June 2025, both AWS and GCP are changing the way RI/SP/CUD discounts are shared—and Usage customers are not impacted. Starting June 1st, 2025, AWS disallowed all vendors who share RI/SP discounts across different customers. These vendors offered a tempting solution: long-term commit savings without the commitment, often with “no fee.” In reality, they negotiated an EDP to earn an extra 5–8 % discount on your spend—and kept the margin themselves. We saw AWS moving to shut this down, so to protect our customers, Usage chose not to pursue that model once the RI Marketplace restrictions arrived. Similarly, GCP rolled out parallel restrictions this month, warning:

“Caution: If you change your Cloud Billing account for a project to another customer’s Cloud Billing account, or allow another customer to use your Cloud Billing account (even with each other’s permission) to reduce or avoid fees, you could be in violation of your terms with Google Cloud.”

Here’s the full timeline of AWS and GCP commitment changes so far:

AWS:

• January 15th, 2024: AWS imposed RI Marketplace restrictions, barring EDP customers from trading Reserved Instances in the marketplace and limiting how many RIs non-EDP customers can sell.
• June 1st, 2025: AWS prohibits companies from using consolidated billing to share RI/SP discounts across different AWS accounts—effectively ending EDP-driven margin models.

GCP:

• June 5th, 2025: GCP updated its ToS to include the above caution around changing or sharing Cloud Billing accounts across customers (source: cloud.google.com/billing/docs/how-to/modify-project).

If you currently rely on a vendor that uses linked accounts to share commitments on AWS or GCP, reach out to them now to determine your best path forward.

Many of these vendors have raised tens of millions of dollars and need to keep operating—so most have pivoted to Usage’s model of Insured Commitments. But Insured Commitments are an entirely different ball game. In the past, these vendors could simply move commitments if a customer’s spend dropped. Now they’re on the hook for cash-back—a real risk that, for larger companies, can amount to hundreds of thousands or even millions if too many underutilization events occur at once. That level of exposure can threaten their viability.

So if a vendor pitches Insured Commitments to you, ask them: What is your loss ratio? The loss ratio is the percentage of their revenue paid back to customers when commitments go underutilized. Usage’s loss ratio started at 35 % and, through rigorous risk management, has fallen to under 10 %—a level considered “excellent” in insurance terms.

Usage is happy to help both customers and non-customers explore new alternatives in cloud-cost management. Reach out anytime at www.usage.ai.