[throwawaysflake]

We knew we weren't going to use the entire prepaid amount and said to the sales rep we didn't think it was worth doing it because our usage was low and we would have amounts left over and the rep insisted the roll-over process would be perfect for our use case (he can see our prior months of on demand) and said literally it is just paperwork (I guess that is technically true, paperwork is involved, so lesson learned!). That said, from what he wrote it seems these "policies" may be new to 2020 because he told me that even newer customers have the renew at the original contract amount or more to roll-over so maybe it was easy paperwork any roll-over back in 2019 when we signed and that has since changed. The contract is so vague that it only protects them, not the customer, if they decide on changing their internal policies. Obviously, if they just stated the policy, we wouldn't have signed any contracts.

We purchase because without contract, you can't access their support engineer which we thought we would need but turned out not needed at all (also, I am starting to doubt if the support engineer part is even true, you can probably submit a ticket anyway).15% is not a significant enough saving to sacrifice the flexibility, given AWS can offer like 75% off at reserve. I wrote this post so others who may be considering it should know their rep may not be transparent about everything or might not be able to live up to their promises. I feel like for their long term, this is counter productive for their business strategy, shrug.