[bigiain]

Keep in mind you get up to 75% discount at AWS for 3yr term upfront payments for reserved instances... (In reality, anything I use only seems to get a ~60% discount for that)

But nobody uses AWS 'cause it's "cheapest". That's completely missing the point.

[quicksilver03]

3yr reserved instances is something that baffled me when I was doing the research for https://www.hostingforappdevelopers.com .

What reasons push people to pay upfront and to commit to a solution whose main benefit is elasticity?

[bigiain]

For those sweet sweet discounts?

Because who cares about costs next year or the year after, I'm just on a 6 month contract here!

(Even more cynically, "because it's just like buying servers, but comes on the OpEx budget not the CapEx one, so _my_ KPIs look _awesome!_")

[bdcravens]

Even the worst reserved pricing gets you 30%-40% off of published rates (nothing upfront, just commit to a year)