Commitments: Savings Plans & Reserved Instances

Track coverage, utilisation, expiry and purchase recommendations for Savings Plans, Reservations and committed use discounts.

Commitments: Savings Plans & Reserved Instances

Cloud providers give a discount if you promise to spend a set amount for one or three years. This page shows how much of your spend is covered by such promises, how well you are using them, and when they expire.

Where in CostGlassCosts → Commitments

PlanGrowth and above (the menu item is greyed out on lower plans)

Who can do thisEveryone on the plan can view. Purchases are made by you in the cloud console.

Time needed20 minutes

In short

Coverage = how much of your eligible spend is discounted by a commitment. Low coverage means money left on the table.
Utilisation = how much of what you committed to you actually used. Low utilisation means you over-committed and are paying for nothing.
The verdict banner puts over-commitment first, because unused commitment is money already spent.
CostGlass never buys a commitment. You buy in the AWS, Azure or Google Cloud console.
AWS has the full picture. Azure and Google Cloud show coverage, with less detail (see Limits).

Commitments: the verdict banner, the four headline cards, the purchase simulator and the renewal radar.

Terms in plain words

On-demand: The normal list price you pay when you have no commitment. It is the most flexible and the most expensive.
Commitment: A promise to the cloud provider to use (and pay for) a certain amount for a fixed term, in return for a lower price. You pay it whether you use it or not.
Savings Plan (AWS): You commit to a number of pounds or dollars per hour of compute. Any matching usage up to that amount is charged at the discounted rate.
Reserved Instance / Reservation: A commitment to a specific kind of resource (for example a particular instance family in a region) for one or three years. AWS calls them Reserved Instances; Azure calls them Reservations.
Committed use discount (Google Cloud): Google Cloud’s version of the same idea.
Coverage: The share of eligible spend that was charged at a commitment rate instead of on-demand.
Utilisation: The share of your commitment that your usage actually consumed. 100% means none was wasted.
Break-even: For options with an upfront payment, the month from which the commitment has cost less than staying on-demand would have.

Before you begin

A Growth plan or above. If the menu item is greyed out, upgrade from the Billing & Plans page.
At least one of AWS, Azure or Google Cloud connected with live access.
Click Sync Commitments once after connecting. Commitment data is also refreshed automatically every day.
Rightsize first. Committing to servers that are about to shrink locks in a bill you were about to reduce (see the Savings playbook).

How to read the page

Toolbar

Control	What it does
Cloud Platform	Choose All Clouds (Portfolio), AWS, Azure or Google Cloud. Numbers are never blended into one misleading percentage per cloud; the portfolio view is a combined summary and the per-cloud views are separate.
Lookback Window	30D, 60D or 90D: how many days the figures are based on.
Sync Commitments	Fetches your latest inventory, coverage and recommendations from every connected cloud now.

The toolbar also reminds you of the target: coverage between 70% and 85%, with about 15% headroom kept on-demand.

Verdict banner

Verdict	Meaning	What to do
Over-Committed	AWS utilisation is below 95%. You are paying for commitment you do not use. This is checked first.	Do not buy more. Find the workloads that shrank or moved region.
Under-Committed	Coverage is below 70%.	Look at the recommendations below, after rightsizing.
Healthy Portfolio	Coverage is at or above target (and, for AWS, utilisation is healthy).	Watch the expiry calendar so coverage does not lapse.

The four cards

Commitment Coverage: Coverage percentage, with the amounts covered and on-demand underneath. Green at 70% or more, amber below.
Realized Savings vs On-Demand: What your commitments saved compared with on-demand prices, per month and per year.
Uncovered On-Demand Opportunity: An estimate of monthly savings if you reached the target coverage. For AWS this uses an assumed Savings Plan discount of about 27%, so it is a planning figure, not a quote.
Active Commitments & Expiry: How many commitments are active and how many expire within 90 days.

Trajectory chart

Multi-Cloud Commitment Coverage Trajectory shows coverage over the chosen window. Switch between Coverage (%) (with a dashed 70% target line) and Spend (covered spend against on-demand spend). If there is not enough history it asks you to synchronise first.

Purchase recommendations

Automated Commitment Recommendations (AWS, Azure & Google Cloud) is ranked by monthly saving.

Column	Meaning
Platform	Which cloud made the recommendation.
Plan & Service	The type of commitment and what it covers.
Payment Option	No Upfront, Partial Upfront or All Upfront (explained below).
Hourly Commit	The hourly amount you would commit to.
Upfront	The amount paid on day one (a dash means none).
Monthly Saving	The estimated monthly saving.
Annual Saving	Monthly saving times twelve.
Discount %	The estimated discount.
Break-Even	Upfront cost divided by monthly saving, or Immediate if nothing is paid upfront.

Note

The recommendations are the cloud’s own (for example AWS’s Savings Plan purchase recommendation) and are a forecast for your usage, not a quote or a guarantee. If a cloud has not supplied any yet, the page can show a CostGlass-calculated estimate from your on-demand spend, based on a fixed 70% target and a fixed assumed discount. Treat it as a prompt to check the provider’s own tool.

Inventory

Active & Expiring Commitments Inventory lists each commitment: platform, name and ID, type, service, monthly commitment, state, expiry date and days remaining. Use Filter commitments… to search and Include retired to show expired ones. A commitment expiring within 90 days is highlighted in amber.

Renewal radar

Commitment Renewal Radar & Automated Alerts lists commitments expiring within 90 days, with a Model in Simulator button that scrolls to the simulator for sizing a replacement and Preview Emailthat sends a sample reminder to your own inbox. CostGlass runs a daily job that sends renewal reminders at 60, 30 and 7 days before expiry. When a commitment expires, matching usage falls back to on-demand rates.

The simulator (what-if)

The Interactive Commitment Purchase Simulator & ROI Modeler lets you try a scenario before you decide. It starts from your real figures (Baseline On-Demand, Eligible Spend, Current Coverage) and then asks for three choices.

Setting	What it does	Options
Target Coverage Slider	The coverage you want to reach. Buttons set it quickly.	Conservative (65%), Sweet Spot (75%), Aggressive (85%)
Commitment Term	One or three years.	1-Year, 3-Year
Payment Option	How you pay.	No Upfront, Partial Upfront, All Upfront

It then shows Projected Coverage, Additional Monthly Savings, Annual Run-Rate Savings and a Break-Even Horizon.

Where the simulator's discount comes from

The discount on the term buttons (for example "1-Year (~22% off)") is taken from your own purchase recommendations when there is a recent one (from the last 14 days) for that cloud and term. For AWS that is the Compute Savings Plan, or failing that the EC2 Instance Savings Plan or EC2 Reserved Instance. For Azure it is the average over your reservation recommendations, weighted by spend. Where there isn't one, the simulator uses a typical published discount for that cloud and says so in the note under the buttons. Google Cloud always uses the typical figure, because Google's recommendations don't include a percentage. All Clouds blends the clouds by their on-demand spend.br/>Upfront and break-even come from your AWS recommendation for the chosen payment option when one exists. Otherwise they are estimated (All Upfront pays the whole term's commitment at purchase, Partial Upfront about half) and the break-even is marked "(estimate)". Use the simulator to compare scenarios, then confirm real figures in the cloud's own purchase screen.

Deciding term and payment option

Term: 1 year

Smaller discount, less lock-in. Better if your workloads or architecture are likely to change, or this is your first commitment.

Term: 3 years

Bigger discount, much more lock-in. Only for steady workloads you are confident will exist in three years.

No Upfront

Pay monthly. Lowest discount of the three, no cash outlay and an immediate break-even.

Partial Upfront

Pay part now, the rest monthly. A middle path.

All Upfront

Pay everything now. Highest discount, but cash is tied up and the break-even is longest.

Tip

A common, careful approach is to cover your steady baseline first (the 70% target leaves room), choose a one-year term, and add more later. Never commit to the peak.

Risk of over-commitment

A commitment is a bill you cannot cancel. If your usage shrinks, moves region or changes to a type the commitment does not cover, you keep paying. Coverage above about 85% leaves little room for change. That is why the verdict flags low utilisation before low coverage.

How to buy one

CostGlass is read-only and does not purchase anything. After deciding:

Rightsize first

Resize or remove waste before committing. See Rightsizing and the Savings playbook.

Open the cloud’s purchase page

AWS: Billing and Cost Management, then Savings Plans (or the EC2 Reserved Instances page). Azure: Reservations or Savings plans in the portal. Google Cloud: Committed use discounts in the console. You need billing permissions in the payer or management account.

Enter the recommended amount

Use the hourly commitment, term and payment option from the recommendation, or your own choice from the simulator. Review the summary the cloud shows before confirming.

Return to CostGlass

Click Sync Commitments. The new commitment appears in the inventory, and coverage rises as the discount applies to usage.

Note

Savings Plans and Reservations are generally bought at the organisation’s payer (management) account, and the discount then applies across linked accounts. CostGlass’s summary and trend are therefore organisation-wide.

Scope and limits

AWS: full coverage and utilisation (Savings Plans and Reserved Instances), inventory with expiry, and purchase recommendations.
Google Cloud: coverage, resource-based commitment inventory and recommendations. Google’s inventory returns no dollar value, so CostGlass does not compute a utilisation percentage for it.
Azure: coverage. Reservation inventory and utilisation need a separate tenant-level consent step and are not available yet, so the verdict is coverage-only.
Coverage and utilisation are never averaged across clouds into one percentage.
Commitments are priced in each cloud’s own currency and converted for display.
Some cost figures are estimates built on assumed discount rates (stated above).
Reaching Commitments needs a Growth plan or above.

Frequently asked questions

My coverage is 0%. Is that wrong?

It may be correct if you have no commitments. If you do have some, click Sync Commitments, and check that the account is connected with live access and that the right provider is selected.

Why does the page say Over-Committed when my coverage is high?

Utilisation below 95% outranks coverage. You are paying for more commitment than you use. Do not buy more until usage catches up or the commitment expires.

Does CostGlass buy or sell commitments?

No. It only reads. There is no purchase button.

What happens when a commitment expires?

The matching usage is billed at on-demand rates again, which can cause a sudden rise in your bill. That is why the renewal radar exists.

Can I get the renewal emails?

A daily job sends reminders at 60, 30 and 7 days before expiry. Use Preview Email to see what they look like.

How is Realized Savings calculated?

From the savings your provider reports for the commitments over the chosen window, scaled to a month.

All Documentation Guides

Welcome to CostGlass — What CostGlass does, who it is for, how your data gets in, the plans and regions, and a plain-English glossary.
Quickstart: your first hour — Sign up, connect a first cloud, invite your team, set a budget and turn on anomaly alerts, with a first-week checklist.
Finding your way around — A tour of the sidebar, top bar and page controls: what every page answers, plan gating, currency, language, links and caching.
Dashboards — The Overview dashboard widget by widget, plus building custom dashboards you can share with your organisation.
Cloud Resources — The multi-cloud inventory: filters, search, categories, estimated cost, terminated resources and CSV or Excel export.
Uptime, incidents & support requests — Monitor public endpoints, route alerts, see incidents and raise requests to CostGlass engineers.
How CostGlass accesses your data — Security and data ingestion architecture: how CostGlass reads multi-cloud billing and telemetry through read-only roles and least-privilege permissions.
Dashboard & Platform Screenshot Tour — Visual walkthrough of the CostGlass interface with screenshots covering multi-cloud spend, Cost Explorer, anomalies, Kubernetes allocation, and savings.
Connecting your clouds: overview — Every cloud and service you can connect, how each one connects, what access it needs, how long data takes and your plan limits.
Connect AWS (CloudFormation) — Deploy the generated CloudFormation template, choose organization or single account and optional features, then verify.
Connect AWS with Terraform instead of CloudFormation — A Terraform equivalent of the generated AWS template, with an Organization variant and a way to compare it to the wizard.
Connect Azure — Admin consent for the CostGlass application, Reader and Cost Management Reader roles, management group or subscription scope, and a Terraform version.
Connect Google Cloud — Enable the FOCUS BigQuery export, run the IAM grants CostGlass prints, verify, and a Terraform version.
Managing connected accounts — The Cloud Accounts page: statuses, syncing, errors, naming, disconnecting, and the FOCUS 1.0 and CUR Export pages.
Connect Oracle Cloud (OCI) — Give CostGlass read-only access to Oracle Cost and Usage Reports with a Resource Manager stack or your own Terraform.
Connect Alibaba Cloud — Connect Alibaba Cloud through Bill Subscription files in OSS and a read-only RAM role created by a ROS template.
Connect DigitalOcean — Connect DigitalOcean accounts with a read-only personal access token and see invoices by month.
Connect Akamai / Linode — Connect Linode (Akamai Connected Cloud) accounts with an account read-only token.
Connect Cloudflare — Connect Cloudflare usage-based charges with a Billing Read account token and see credits and unpaid debt.
Connect OpenAI, Anthropic, Datadog and Snowflake — Connect AI and software vendors with admin keys or a Snowflake key pair so their spend sits beside your cloud costs.
Cost Explorer — Slice, compare and drill into spend across every connected cloud: group by, filters, charts, overlays, details, AI, links and export.
Saved views, saved filters & scheduled emails — Keep, share and email the Cost Explorer views you use often, and reuse include/exclude filters across views and reports.
Reports — Build, compare, export, save and schedule spend reports, with presets, Excel, CSV and PDF exports.
SaaS & AI Spend — Spend and token analytics for OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepSeek, Datadog, Snowflake and cloud AI services.
Unit Economics — Cost per business unit: define metrics, send volumes, set targets and alerts.
Connect a Kubernetes cluster — Install OpenCost and the CostGlass exporter in your cluster so cost data is pushed to CostGlass every 15 minutes.
Kubernetes Costs page — Understand cluster, namespace, workload and pod costs, idle capacity, rightsizing, carbon and health.
Tagging strategy: getting the most from tags — How to tag cloud resources, enforce tagging, and when to use cloud tags or virtual tags in CostGlass.
Tag Explorer — Group billed spend by the value of a tag, see tag coverage per cloud and drill into resources.
Tag Compliance — Define required AWS tags, measure compliance, and fix missing tags with Quick Tag, batch apply or a CLI script.
Virtual tagging — Allocate spend by team, product or environment with rules, no cloud changes, with a rule builder and CostGlass AI.
Forecasting — Forecast month-end spend, the next months and a yearly run-rate, and simulate the cost of changes.
Budgets — Create spending limits for a cloud, account, service or team, and see how CostGlass budgets differ from native AWS, Azure and Google budgets.
Anomaly detection — How CostGlass finds unusual daily cost, how to tune it, explain it and be notified.
Cost alerts — Alert when spend rises versus the previous day, week, month or quarter.
All alert and notification types — A comparison of every alert and notification in CostGlass, with channel setup and testing.
Issues & annotations — Dated notes on spend, and a lightweight issue tracker for cost work with Jira push.
Savings playbook — A prioritised, step-by-step programme for reducing your cloud bill, with a 30/60/90-day plan.
Savings recommendations — How the Savings page finds, prices and tracks savings for every connected cloud and platform.
Rightsizing — Find servers and databases that are too big, or too small, using real CPU and memory measurements.
Commitments: Savings Plans & Reserved Instances — Track coverage, utilisation, expiry and purchase recommendations for Savings Plans, Reservations and committed use discounts.
Instance Scheduler — Start and stop non-production servers on a weekly schedule to stop paying for idle hours.
Giving your team access — Invite people, choose Owner, Admin or Member roles, remove users and limit what they see.
Setting up your organisation hierarchy — Build a tree of nodes, place cloud accounts by hand, rule or CSV, and scope people to a branch.
Designing your hierarchy (with enterprise examples) — Principles and worked patterns for AWS Organizations, single accounts, multi-cloud groups, MSPs and regulated regions.
Single sign-on (SAML & OIDC) — Connect Okta, Entra ID, Google Workspace or another provider, verify your domain, test and require SSO.
API keys & AI assistants (MCP) — Create API keys and connect Claude Desktop, Cursor or Claude Code to your cost data.
Audit log — See who changed what and when, with before and after values, kept for 24 months.
Data residency & retention — Your fixed region, how long cost history is kept, purge now and the data handling summary.
Notification settings, Jira & chat — Weekly spend summary, Slack and Teams webhooks, and connecting Jira Cloud.
Troubleshooting & Common Setup Fixes — Solutions for common cloud connection and ingestion issues across AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, OCI, Alibaba Cloud, Kubernetes, and SSO.

Commitments: Savings Plans & Reserved Instances