How Much Profit Can MSPs Gain Using Guaranteed Commitments vs. Native RI and SP?

If you're an MSP or cloud reseller, you already know that cloud commitments are where margin lives. Reserved Instances (RIs) and Savings Plans (SPs) can reduce a customer's AWS spend by 20%–40% compared to on-demand pricing — and whoever manages those commitments has historically captured the difference.

But here's the problem with the native model: when you purchase RIs or SPs on behalf of a customer and they scale down mid-year, restructure, or exit — you absorb 100% of the financial exposure. AWS keeps the commitment. You eat the loss. AWS policy changes effective June 2025 also ended cross-customer commitment sharing, eliminating the traditional arbitrage margin source for many resellers entirely.

That means native AWS commitments today offer the MSP direct margin only when commitments are fully utilized — and zero recurring commission if they're not.

Purchasing native RIs or SPs for a customer means making a financial commitment to AWS on their behalf. The margin between the discounted rate and what you bill the customer is your revenue. But if that customer downsizes, AWS doesn’t issue a refund— the unused capacity is a sunk cost, and in the native model, it comes out of your margin.

Guaranteed Reserved Instances (GRI) and Guaranteed Savings Plans (GSP), offered through Ripple, work differently. Rather than purchasing native RIs and SPs directly, you enroll customers in a guaranteed plan:

The Guaranteed Commitments commission is additive— it stacks on top of your SPP base reseller, not instead of it.

Before the scenario numbers, understanding the three utilization zones is essential — they determine whether your customer saves money, avoids a loss, or generates commission for you.

The pivot formula is: Coverage × Utilization = 0.60

The revenue threshold depends on coverage:

Key lever: higher coverage lowers the utilization threshold for revenue. If your customer has reliable utilization above 75%, push coverage to 80–100% to enter the revenue zone faster.

All figures are based on Tokyo Region on-demand pricing, with +7% SPP shown throughout as a sample indication of the additional base reseller margin on top of the Guaranteed Commitments commission, for consistency.

A production fleet of 100 EC2 m5.xlarge instances enrolled in a 1-Year Guaranteed Commitments (High Discount Plan) delivers committed discount rates with a refund backstop if savings go negative — compared to a 1-Year AWS Compute SP that offers slightly deeper discounts but leaves the customer exposed if any instance is retired or resized mid-year, and generates no direct commission for you.

The standard AWS Compute SP saves the customer ~$1,864 more per month on paper — but that comparison ignores what happens when workloads change. If the customer scales down or retires instances mid-year, AWS keeps 100% of the Compute SP commitment and you absorb the exposure.

Under Guaranteed Commitments, the proportional lost savings are refunded to the customer. Your commission is earned on the Risk Premium, which is tied to realized savings — so as long as the customer's net savings remain positive, your commission continues. If savings reach zero, no Risk Premium is charged for that period.

The Guaranteed Commitments route generates ~$478/mo in commission on top of your existing SPP base margin — a meaningful revenue addition with zero additional commitment risk.

Your MSP sample revenue projection per account for Scenario 1 (at full utilization):

At 80% coverage—leaving 20% of the fleet on native AWS—you still earn an estimated $8,603 in Guaranteed Commitments commission over three years for this one account, on top of your SPP base. Coverage doesn’t have to be all or nothing.

Portfolio penetration — Scenario 1 (100 total customers, 80% coverage per enrolled account, 1-Year Guaranteed Commitments):

At 80% utilization, compare: Native SP route at 100 accounts earns SPP base margin only — but puts ~$1,388,000/month in committed cloud spend on your balance sheet with zero protection if any customer churns.

Portfolio penetration across utilization levels —Scenario 1 (100 total customers, coverage of 80% at 1-Year Guaranteed Commitments)

Below 80% at 80% coverage: commission = $0 but Guaranteed Commitments is actively refunding customers and protecting them losses. At 80% and above: the customers save while you earn.

A full-stack workload running 80 × EC2 m5.xlarge app servers alongside 40 × RDS db.r5.large database instances shows where 1-Year Guaranteed Commitments pulls ahead — covering both services under one plan and a refund guarantee, while the equivalent AWS Compute SP requires a separate $40,400 upfront RDS commitment with no exit protection.

AWS Compute SP doesn't cover EC2 and RDS at the same terms. To cover database instances with native commitments, you fall back to RDS Reserved Instances — which require $40,400 in upfront cash from the customer for just 40 instances, with no refund if any database is resized or retired mid-year.

Guaranteed Commitments covers both EC2 and RDS under a single plan and refund guarantee. The question to put to your customer: "Would you pay $1,562 more per month to keep that capital liquid and get a full refund if your database footprint changes?" For most, the answer is yes.

The Guaranteed Commitments route generates ~$834/mo in commission on top of your existing SPP base margin — with no margin exposure and a single plan covering both services.

Your MSP sample revenue projection per account at 90% utilization—Scenario 2:

Portfolio penetration — Scenario 2 (100 total customers, 80% coverage per enrolled account, 1-Year Guaranteed Commitments, 90% utilization ):

A 50 × EC2 t3.large fleet on a Guaranteed Commitments Flexible Plan matches the exact monthly cost of a 1-Year AWS Compute SP while cutting the lock-in from 12 months to 30 days — making it the go-to pitch for customers who aren't ready to commit long-term but still want real savings.

The Guaranteed Commitments Flexible Plan delivers the exact same monthly cost and savings as a 1-Year AWS Compute SP — but the customer is only committed for 30 days at a time. If they downsize in month 3, they simply stop renewing and proportional savings are refunded for that period. With the native SP, they've committed to ~$38,124 over 12 months — and there's no exit. Same price. Radically different risk profile. The phrase that typically closes this: "Same cost as a 1-year AWS Savings Plan — but you stay flexible after any 30 days."

Your MSP revenue/ account for Scenario 3 at 90% utilization:

Small per-account numbers — but this is the account you close in a single conversation, and the commission is pure incremental revenue on top of your existing SPP base.

Portfolio penetration — Scenario 3 (100 total customers, 80% coverage, 30-day Guaranteed Commitments, 90% utilization):

A 100 × EC2 m5.xlarge fleet that scales down to 70% utilization mid-year illustrates the refund guarantee in action — where the Guaranteed Commitments adjusts and refunds the unused portion, while the AWS Compute SP continues charging the full commitment cost regardless of how much the customer actually uses.

At any utilization level, the customer's Guaranteed Commitments cost can never exceed on-demand. Under AWS SP, that unused spend is simply lost — no refund, no credit. Your commission is earned on the Risk Premium, which is tied to the customer's realized net savings. As long as net savings remain positive, commission accrues. If net savings drop to zero, no Risk Premium is charged for that period.

Guaranteed Commitments coverage breakdown at 70% utilization:

Portfolio penetration — Scenario 4 (100 total customers, 80% coverage, 1-Year Guaranteed Commitments):

For MSPs managing ~$50,000/month in total customer cloud spend across EC2 and RDS — with 30-Day Guaranteed Commitments adopted across the full book:

The commission is additive to your SPP base — not a replacement. At $50,000/month portfolio scale, the 20% Guaranteed Commitments commission layer alone generates ~$2,000/month ($24,000/year) in pure incremental profit on top of existing margins.

Where Guaranteed Commitments Wins and Where to Be Honest

Where native commitments still win: raw monthly savings for stable workloads on 3-year all-upfront RI plans — but only for customers with perfectly stable infrastructure, a very long time horizon, available capital, and zero need to change architecture for 36 months.

Guaranteed Commitments wins for MSPs: any customer with evolving workloads, any customer who can't afford upfront cash, any customer who needs RDS alongside EC2 — and any MSP who wants to earn commission on top of their existing SPP margin without absorbing commitment risk.

The traditional MSP commitment arbitrage model was straightforward: buy cheap, resell higher, keep the spread. Post-June 2025 AWS policy changes have ended cross-customer commitment sharing, compressing or eliminating those margins for many resellers.

The Guaranteed Commitments model replaces a margin-at-risk approach with a commission-on-service-fee approach:

Traditional arbitrage margin: variable, dependent on utilization, disappears when customers scale down, and disappears entirely when AWS policy closes the arbitrage opportunity.

Guaranteed Commitments commission: tied to the Risk Premium, which is calculated on realized net savings per enrolled account. Commission accrues each month savings remain positive — and because the guarantee caps downside, the Risk Premium is never charged on savings that don't materialize. This makes it predictable, recurring, and additive to your SPP base margin.

The result is that MSPs who fully transition accounts to Guaranteed Commitments shift from a high-variance, risk-exposed margin model to a predictable, recurring revenue stream — the kind of revenue that makes your business more valuable and more defensible.

The figures in this article come from real scenarios modeled in the Ripple Guaranteed Commitments Revenue Simulator — the same tool available to MSP partners through Ripple's Guaranteed Commitment Manager.

Calculate your potential revenue with the Ripple Guaranteed Commitments Revenue Simulator →