AWS commitment optimization

Pay less for the AWS you already run. Commit for one month.

Autopilot buys and sells your EC2 and RDS reservations for you. Up to 50% off EC2 and 69% off RDS, the kind of discount that normally needs a three-year contract. We hold the long commitments so you don’t. You pay 10% of what actually lands in your bill.

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AWS Partner · ISO 27001 · Read-only access · Cancel on 30 days

Conditions subject to existing AWS contracts.

What it did for one customer

A SaaS platform in the automotive industry was buying its own Savings Plans and Reserved Instances from internal analysis. It was working. They were already getting a 47.7% discount.

Autopilot took over commitment buying in April 2025. Over the following twelve months it saved them $590,909 at a 59.6% average discount off on-demand pricing, which is $118,320 more than their own strategy would have delivered on the same workloads. Nothing was migrated and their existing Savings Plans stayed in place.

$590,909

saved in a year

59.6%

average discount off on-demand

25%

more savings than their own Savings Plans

Read the full case study

Reserved Instances, bought and sold for you

Most AWS cost tools optimise Savings Plans. Autopilot uses Reserved Instances instead, and the difference is worth explaining, because it is where the extra discount comes from.

A Savings Plan covers a broad family of instances loosely. That is convenient, and AWS sets the discount to match that breadth. A Reserved Instance points at one exact instance type, size and availability zone, and AWS pays more for the certainty. The catch is that somebody has to keep the reservations matched to what is actually running.

Three things a Reserved Instance can do that a Savings Plan cannot:

Match the exact instance.
Not a family. The specific type and size in the specific availability zone you are running right now.
Buy short terms on the Reserved Instance Marketplace.
Commitments of a few months, rather than AWS’s minimum of one year.
Sell the position back.
When a workload is resized, migrated or retired, the reservation is resold rather than left to expire unused.

That third one is why your commitment can be one month while the reservations underneath run for up to three years. Somebody has to carry the term and be able to get out of it. That is us.

Read more: Why Reserved Instances save more than Savings Plans · Three things Reserved Instances can do that Savings Plans can’t

Short terms for the part that moves, long terms for the floor

Your infrastructure is not static. Some of it changes constantly and some of it has not moved in two years, and those two halves should be bought differently.

In the customer account above, Autopilot made 93 purchases covering 1,046 instances over twelve months. 82 of them ran between one and twelve months, bought short for the workloads that keep changing. Eleven ran longer, from thirteen months to three years, for the stable floor. Those eleven hold 474 of the 1,046 instances and most of the savings still running today.

That split is the work. It is not about buying a lot, it is about knowing which half of your estate is stable and committing accordingly, then adjusting as that changes.

Read more: Short terms for the part that moves, long terms for the floor

Autopilot compared with buying commitments yourself

AWS 3-year Reserved Instance
Savings
~50–70%
Commitment
3 years
Prepayment
Often
If workloads change
Stranded
AWS Savings Plans
Savings
~30–66%
Commitment
1–3 years
Prepayment
Optional
If workloads change
Can over-commit
Glassity Autopilot
Savings
Up to 50% EC2, 69% RDS
Commitment
1 month
Prepayment
None
If workloads change
Position sold back

Figures based on observed customer accounts. Exact savings depend on workload pattern and instance family.

What you will get

On-demand flexibility.

Resize, migrate or retire instances without stranding a commitment.

Your existing commitments.

Savings Plans and Reserved Instances you already hold stay in place. Autopilot targets what they don’t cover.

Your engineering time.

No migration, no rightsizing project, no monthly purchasing review. Rate optimisation moves to us; usage optimisation stays with you, where it belongs.

Control of your account.

Read-only access. Nothing is deployed in your environment and nothing about your infrastructure changes.

Is Autopilot right for you?

It fits when:

  • You run meaningful EC2 or RDS workloads on AWS
  • Nobody on your team has time to manage commitments continuously
  • You want the discount without a multi-year contract on your balance sheet

It fits less well when:

  • Your workloads are almost entirely spot or serverless, where commitments have little to reach
  • You have just signed large three-year commitments and have no uncovered spend
  • Your spend is small enough that the effort outweighs the return, in which case we will tell you

You pay 10% of what we save

No platform fee. No minimum. No setup cost. No prepayment.

We take 10% of savings verified in your own AWS billing data. If nothing lands in your bill, you owe nothing. Cancel on 30 days notice.

Read more: What AWS cost tools charge, including the ones cheaper than us

Read-only, and that’s all

A cross-account IAM role with read permissions. We read your AWS billing and usage data. We cannot see data on your servers and we cannot modify your infrastructure.

No agents are installed. ISO 27001 certified. AWS Partner.

Security details

FAQ

AWS commitment optimization is the practice of buying Reserved Instances or Savings Plans to reduce the rate paid for compute, and keeping those commitments matched to actual usage over time. Because workloads change, a commitment bought for one configuration can become unused, so the discount depends as much on ongoing management as on the initial purchase.

Autopilot buys and sells Reserved Instances on a customer’s behalf, matched to the exact instance types, sizes and availability zones they are running. It uses short terms from the AWS Reserved Instance Marketplace for workloads that change and longer terms for stable ones, and resells positions when workloads move. Customers pay 10% of savings verified in their AWS bill.

Yes, through a third party that holds the commitment. Glassity buys and holds the Reserved Instances itself, so the customer commits for one month and can cancel on 30 days notice while still receiving the discounted rate. The multi-year term sits with Glassity.

They can, but only with continuous management. Savings Plans cover a broad family of instances at a discount set by that breadth. Reserved Instances target a specific instance type, size and availability zone, which earns a deeper discount but needs constant matching to real usage. In one twelve-month customer deployment, moving from self-managed Savings Plans to Autopilot-managed Reserved Instances raised the discount from 47.7% to 59.6%.

A stranded commitment is a Reserved Instance or Savings Plan that no longer matches the workload it was bought for, usually after instances are resized, migrated or retired. The customer continues paying for capacity they do not use. Short terms and reselling positions on the Reserved Instance Marketplace avoid this.

AWS advertises savings of up to 72% with Savings Plans. Most organisations achieve closer to 23% in practice, once uncovered spend, unused commitment and instance families that drift from the original commitment are accounted for.

A cross-account IAM role with read-only permissions to AWS billing and usage data. No agents are installed on customer workloads, Glassity cannot read data held on customer servers, and it cannot modify infrastructure. Setup takes about fifteen minutes.

Yes. Existing commitments stay in place and are not cancelled or renegotiated. Autopilot targets spend those commitments do not cover. In one customer account this added $118,320 beyond what the customer’s own Savings Plans strategy delivered.

Savings begin appearing in the AWS bill in the first billing cycle after commitments are purchased. Setup takes about fifteen minutes and requires no engineering work beyond creating a read-only IAM role.

Yes. Autopilot is listed on AWS Marketplace, so it can be purchased through an existing AWS account and billed on the same invoice. For customers with an Enterprise Discount Program or Private Pricing Agreement, that spend counts toward the committed amount, which means adding Autopilot does not create a new budget line to defend.

Not necessarily. Purchasing through AWS Marketplace uses the AWS relationship and billing already in place, so procurement, security review and payment can follow the process already approved for AWS rather than a new supplier onboarding.

See what’s available on your own bill

Free savings estimate. Fifteen minutes, read-only access. You will know the number before you decide anything.

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No card. No contract. We only get paid when your bill goes down.