Enterprise Support restructure: $1.8M saved over two years.

The customer had 14 linked AWS accounts under a single payer organization. Every account was on Enterprise Support at the 10% minimum charge floor, which is the way most organizations grow into Enterprise Support without thinking carefully about it. As the company scaled, Enterprise Support cost had grown to $2.5M annually — about 7% of total AWS spend — even though only four of the 14 accounts ran customer-facing workloads with operational support needs.

The other ten accounts were development, sandbox, data science exploration, and acquired-company environments. Several of those acquired accounts had originally been on Business Support and had been moved to Enterprise Support during account consolidation without any analysis of whether they needed it. The TAM (Technical Account Manager) assigned to the account was effectively spending all of his time on the four production accounts, which meant the customer was paying for TAM scope across ten accounts that received no meaningful TAM engagement.

What the customer needed

• An account-by-account support tier analysis to align tier to actual operational need
• A TAM scope rewrite that priced the TAM relationship to where the work actually happens
• Credit allocation across accounts so that earned EDP credits could offset support spend
• Preserved response-time SLAs on the four production accounts

Drawing on the firm's $2.4B+ AWS spend reviewed and 500+ engagements, we approached this as a portfolio optimization problem rather than a tier-downgrade negotiation. The framing matters because AWS sales operations responds very differently to “help us right-size” than to “we want to leave Enterprise Support.”

Phase 1 — Account-level support audit (weeks 1-2)

The audit categorized each of the 14 accounts on three dimensions: production criticality (customer-facing yes or no), support case volume over the previous 12 months, and TAM-engaged work hours. The result was clear. Four accounts justified Enterprise Support. Four accounts justified Business Support. Six accounts justified Developer Support. Two of those six had opened zero support cases in 12 months and could legitimately move to Basic.

The audit produced two artifacts. The first was the right-sized tier allocation, which on its own represented $1.3M of annual support savings if implemented unilaterally. The second was the TAM scope rewrite — a one-page statement of work that priced the TAM at the four production accounts only, with the explicit understanding that the TAM would not be responsible for the other ten.

Phase 2 — Open the support amendment (weeks 3-5)

The opening conversation framed the request as “help us match support to actual operational profile.” This is meaningfully different from a tier downgrade. The customer presented the audit, the TAM SOW, and a proposal to allocate 60% of the remaining Enterprise Support spend through accumulated EDP credit balance, which AWS had been treating as restricted to consumption charges only.

AWS's initial counter retained Enterprise Support on 11 of the 14 accounts at full pricing. The negotiating position was that “Enterprise Support is operational best practice for the linked-account model.” That position is AWS's default but is not contractually enforced for any account that does not opt in to it.

Phase 3 — Close (weeks 6-7)

The closing weeks moved past the account team to the AWS support operations director, who has discretion on TAM scope pricing. The final structure landed the four production accounts on Enterprise Support, four accounts on Business Support, and six accounts on Developer Support. The TAM SOW was accepted at 60% of the original TAM price. EDP credit balance was approved as a valid offset for support charges going forward, which became the largest single piece of the savings number.

The restructured support agreement produced $1.8M in two-year savings against the pre-negotiation trajectory. The savings came from four distinct levers, none of which compromised the response-time SLAs on the production accounts.

Where the savings came from

• Tier reallocation — $1.0M from moving ten accounts to support tiers that matched their actual operational profile
• TAM scope rewrite — $260K from pricing the TAM relationship to the production-account scope where the work was already happening
• EDP credit application — $410K from applying accumulated EDP credit balance against the remaining Enterprise Support charges
• Removal of duplicate support overlays — $130K from cancelling unused IEM (Infrastructure Event Management) prepayments inherited from acquired company contracts

What the customer preserved

Response-time SLAs on production-impacting events remained at 15 minutes. The TAM relationship continued on the four production accounts at the same engagement cadence. Bus Support tier accounts retained 24/7 case access with one-hour response on production-down classifications, which is sufficient for the development and acquired-company workloads. The customer also preserved access to AWS Trusted Advisor at the deeper-feature level across all accounts — which had been a concern raised by the security team during the audit.

What the customer did with the savings

About $900K was reinvested into a third-party observability platform that gave the engineering team better leading-indicator metrics, which had previously been part of why the team felt it needed broad Enterprise Support coverage. The remaining $900K offset cloud budget growth across the four production accounts, which were each scaling at 40% to 60% annually.