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How It Works
AWS offers the EDP to organizations that commit to spending a set dollar amount on AWS over a defined contract term, typically one to three years. In exchange for that commitment, AWS applies a discount rate to the customer’s eligible spend. The discount rate and the minimum spend threshold are both negotiated directly with an AWS account team. Because the terms are set through a commercial negotiation rather than a self-service console, EDP agreements are generally available to mid-market and enterprise customers with substantial and predictable AWS spend.
The discount applies at the billing level across eligible services, which means engineering teams do not need to change how they provision or manage infrastructure. However, if the customer’s actual spend falls short of the committed minimum, they may still owe the shortfall amount or face other contractual consequences depending on the agreement terms.
Why It Matters for Cloud Cost
For organizations with large, stable AWS footprints, the EDP can reduce the effective rate paid across a broad surface of services in a single negotiation. This is distinct from Reserved Instances and Savings Plans, which require customers to commit at the resource or compute level. The EDP operates at the commercial layer, making it potentially simpler to apply across diverse workloads.
The risk is that committing to a minimum spend figure over multiple years introduces exposure if the organization’s cloud usage declines, a project is cancelled, or the team migrates workloads to another provider. Underutilizing an EDP commitment means paying for spend that did not occur. Finance and procurement teams evaluating an EDP need to model usage growth conservatively to avoid locking in more than the organization can reliably consume.
The EDP also does not replace commitment-based discounts. Many organizations layer an EDP with Reserved Instances or Savings Plans to achieve further reductions on top of the base EDP rate. Managing both layers simultaneously adds complexity to cost forecasting and commitment tracking.
Usage AI: Usage AI’s Autopilot and CoPilot modes manage Reserved Instances and Savings Plans independently of any EDP agreement, so organizations can stack commitment-based savings on top of an existing EDP discount without manual coordination.