AWS Pricing & Support

AWS Pricing & Support Overview

AWS Free Tier

AWS offers a free tier to help users explore and experiment with AWS services:

1. Always Free: Services with free usage limits available indefinitely (e.g., Lambda free tier, DynamoDB).

2. 12-Month Free: Services with free usage limits for the first 12 months after signing up (e.g., EC2, S3).

3. Trials & Beta Access: Short-term free trials or beta services for testing new features and capabilities.

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AWS Pricing Concepts

1. Pay-As-You-Go:

   • Only pay for what you use, without upfront commitments.

   • Avoids overprovisioning and optimizes costs.

2. Pay Less When You Reserve:

   • Save money by committing to long-term use of specific resources (e.g., Reserved Instances).

3. Economies of Scale:

   • Costs decrease as usage increases, benefiting from AWS's large-scale operations.

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AWS Billing Support Features

1. Billing Dashboard:

   • A centralized view of your AWS spending, usage, and forecasts.

   • Provides key insights like monthly expenses, recent invoices, and service-wise breakdowns.

2. Consolidated Billing:

   • Combines billing for multiple AWS accounts under a single AWS Organization.

   • Simplifies management and provides volume discounts across accounts.

3. AWS Budgets:

   • Enables setting custom cost, usage, and reservation budgets.

   • Sends alerts when thresholds are exceeded or nearing limits.

4. AWS Cost Explorer:

   • An interactive tool to analyze spending and usage trends over time.

   • Provides detailed visualizations and forecasts to optimize costs.

5. AWS Marketplace:

   • A digital catalog offering third-party software, services, and data products.

   • Enables streamlined procurement, deployment, and billing directly through your AWS account.

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AWS Service Plans

AWS Service Plans

1. Basic Support (Free):

   • Includes:

     • Documentation and whitepapers

     • 24/7 access to customer service

     • Support forums

     • AWS Personal Health Dashboard

2. AWS Developer Support:

   • Adds:

     • Email support with 24-hour response time for general issues.

     • 12-hour response time for system degradation.

3. AWS Business Support:

   • Adds:

     • Access to AWS Trusted Advisor for full checks.

     • Phone call support.

     • Assistance from Cloud Support Engineers.

     • Response times:

       • 4 hours for general issues.

       • 1 hour for system down scenarios.

     • Infrastructure event management.

4. AWS Enterprise Support (On-Ramp):

   • Adds:

     • 30-minute response time for critical system issues.

     • Access to a pool of technical teams and managers for support.

5. AWS Enterprise Support (Service Plan):

   • Adds:

     • 15-minute response time for critical issues.

     • A designated Technical Account Manager (TAM) to provide personalized support and guidance.

Each successive service plan builds upon and includes all features of the previous plans.