AWS Support Pricing

If you are a tech company on the AWS cloud, buying AWS Support is one of the best things you can do for your business. It immediately gives you access to incredibly skilled professionals to fill gaps in your knowledge. While it’s obvious you can reach out when you are having problems, you can reach out for guidance, too. Support has saved me weeks of work with a few deep insights into technical issues they foresaw me running into down the line. RDS? Migrations? VPNs? Exotic VPC layouts? If you are doing anything remotely interesting, then they can help and advise.

You still have options for the rare case where frontline support can’t help. They are not afraid of escalating: when things aren’t making sense, they engage the same engineering team that works on the service to help. What a great thing to have — you can hear exactly from the service developers! I’ve had wacky permissions policies explained to me, workarounds for internal implementation issues, and you can get timelines for when they will ship a feature you want — sometimes you can wait out your work. You can even put in feature requests. I’ve seen my requests turn into real features!

From a business perspective, it’s also an insurance policy against things going wrong and gives you options when it does. On the business plan you can access support in at most 1 hour. If your product depends on AWS to work, this is a no-brainer. If we’re having an outage, I’d rather tell my customer that I am on the phone with AWS engineers rather than telling my customer that I didn’t opt into a better support plan.

Support = $$$

The issue is that support is expensive. Each AWS account you enroll in support has a cost of MAX($100, 10% of spend) ¹. Did you get that? Per account! That’s insane in a world where AWS has declared that the best practice is a multi-account setup. To enroll your entire multi-account organization in support, you must pay (drumroll please…) at least $5,000 every month. Just on Support.

AWS is being hypocritical: they preach the virtues of multi-account on the one hand and then make it financially painful to do so on the other.

They need to add an organization-wide plan that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg. The Business plan needs to be made multi-account.

Weird Hack

In an effort to show how dumb AWS Support pricing is, I will show how to get around it. Ultimately, the $200 fixes cost washes away and the 10% additional cost becomes the main factor. But you can get around that!

1. Create an AWS organization and create a single subaccount.
2. Run all of your workloads in your sub-account.
3. Buy all of your RIs in your master account.
4. Enroll only your sub-account in a support plan.

Now you have a situation where the 10% bill does not apply to your RI purchases, but you will receive support for those resources in the subaccount. This is an artifact of AWS Support billing model. It’s a stupid model and they should change it. If they had affordable (not $5,000+/mo!) options, it would be a braindead simple choice to just enroll the entire organization. Then this dumb hack would not work.

I hope that by showing how to avoid dumb per-account support billing, AWS will consider adding better org-wide options. It’s the only way they should be billing support.