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Once the rate and the commitment are settled, three lines carry most of the money still on the table. Credits, marketplace, and support. Each behaves differently, and two of them interact badly if you do not model them together. They are also the lines AWS is most willing to move on, because they come from different budgets than your discount.
Credits are real money with sharp edges. Migration funding, training, proof of concept, professional services. They almost never appear in a first offer, and one documented negotiation added two point three million dollars, worth fifteen percent of the first year commitment. The edges are contractual and worth knowing before you celebrate.
Credits expire, typically a year from issue or at term end, whichever comes first. AWS's own published terms exclude them from marketplace, professional services, training, certification, and enterprise support, which the commitment makes mandatory. They cannot buy Savings Plan or Reserved Instance prepayments. Outcome based credits need an executive attestation and can be clawed back if the outcome slips.
And the interaction that catches people: credits reduce the cash spend that retires your commitment while the commitment stays fixed. Win three million in migration credits against a ten million commitment and you may have just manufactured a three million shortfall. Take the credits. Model them against the commit in the same spreadsheet, on the same day.
Marketplace is insurance, not a saving. Third party software bought through AWS Marketplace retires your commitment dollar for dollar, capped at around a quarter of it, and that cap is negotiable toward thirty or thirty five percent. But it earns no discount at all. A million dollars of marketplace software burns a million of commitment at full list, forfeiting the couple of hundred thousand the same money would have earned as native spend.
So it is how you avoid writing a true up cheque, not how you lower your bill. Two current rules matter. Since May twenty twenty five only software hosted entirely on AWS qualifies, judged by invoice date with no grandfathering, so agreements sized against a multi cloud software portfolio may already be short. And there is a separate list of commitment eligible products, things like VMware Cloud on AWS, Red Hat OpenShift, Oracle Database on AWS and third party foundation models, which appear to retire commitment outside that percentage cap entirely.
Support is the line nobody negotiates. Enterprise support is mandatory under the commitment, and AWS states in its own pricing page that fees are calculated on gross AWS charges before any discounts or credits are applied. Which produces the uncomfortable arithmetic from episode two: the better your discount, the larger support becomes as a share of what you actually pay. At a million a month of usage, support is a mid five figure monthly line that your negotiated rate does absolutely nothing to reduce.
And check your numbers against the current tiers, because AWS restructured support in December twenty twenty five and most published guidance is stale. The enterprise minimum came down from fifteen thousand a month to five thousand, a new top tier appeared above it, and the older plans retire at the start of twenty twenty seven. Only the floors moved though: above roughly a hundred and fifty thousand a month the percentage bands bind exactly as before.
There is an arbitrage sitting between them. AWS publishes a list of charges excluded from the support fee calculation, and marketplace is on it. So marketplace spend retires commitment and stays out of the support fee base at the same time. For a large estate, routing third party software through marketplace rather than consuming an equivalent native service can be worth six figures a year in avoided support alone.
It is the strongest genuine argument for the marketplace route, and it is stronger than the discount argument, because there is no discount.
Sequence the asks so they do not cancel out. Settle the rate and the commitment first, because they set your effective price for the whole term. Then take credits for genuinely incremental migration work, not as a substitute for discount points. Then attack support: ask for it calculated on net, or a cap, or price the partner led route, which runs materially below the direct tiers.
And keep one rule in mind through all of it: only what is written in the term sheet counts. AWS publishes no rulebook for any of this, which is exactly why every one of these is a drafting question rather than a policy you have to accept.
One last point. At Redress Compliance we negotiate these three lines alongside the rate, on pure contingency: twenty five percent of what we save you, and nothing saved, nothing paid. Next episode: the contract terms that outlast every discount.
Redress Compliance works on contingency: our fee is 25 percent of what we save you. Nothing saved, nothing paid. Independent, buyer side only, never vendor funded. Want Redress to contact you? Reach out and we respond the same day.
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