Over 33% of organizations did not use commitments, and even those that did still left savings on the table. Only automation can increase the flexibility required to maximize cloud savings.
AUSTIN, TEXAS / ACCESS Newswire / December 18, 2025 / ProsperOps, a leading FinOps automation platform, released its 2025 cloud benchmarking reports for Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud, providing a comprehensive view of how organizations have been optimizing compute costs. The findings reveal that most organizations failed to achieve optimal outcomes related to rate optimization.
Rate optimization encompasses activities, such as managing commitments, negotiated rates, and spot instances/VMs to reduce costs. Effective Savings Rate (ESR) measures the net return on investment achieved through rate optimization. Using publicly available cost and usage data, the reports evaluated rate-optimization outcomes by benchmarking ESR and examining the application of various commitment types. Combined, the reports examined billions of dollars in compute usage.
Key Takeaways
Effective Savings Rate results were mediocre at best, despite increased adoption of commitments. The median AWS compute ESR for Reserved Instances/Savings Plans (RIs/SPs) was only 15%, compared to more than 45% in the top 5th percentile, implying significant room for improvement. Analysis of Google Cloud Compute ESRs produced similar findings.
Many organizations did not use commitments. Deploying both commitments and negotiated rates maximizes ESR, but 36% of AWS organizations did not leverage RIs/SPs, and 40% of Google Cloud billing accounts did not leverage Committed Use Discounts (CUDs).
Organizations tended to use only one type of commitment (e.g., resource-based CUDs on Google Cloud, Savings Plans on AWS), yet a diversified portfolio of commitments can yield better outcomes. The right mix of commitments can apply to a broader range of resources and offer more flexibility.
Most FinOps teams relied on infrequent, batch purchases of commitments. This approach can result in organizations being stuck with large, long-term commitments, leading to unutilized commitments and wasted spend if usage declines.
Without intelligent automation, even the most sophisticated FinOps teams hit an ESR ceiling. On both AWS and Google Cloud, organizations with higher compute usage tended to achieve higher ESRs, because they were more likely to invest in FinOps capabilities. However, these organizations also struggled the most to further improve their outcomes. Maintaining consistently high ESRs while managing commitment coverage and risk is extremely difficult to do manually.
Optimal Savings Require Automation
Managing commitments effectively in multi-cloud environments is highly complex. Organizations need to understand the specific rules that govern different types of commitments for each cloud provider and adapt those commitments to changes in dynamic cloud environments. As usage patterns evolve, FinOps teams must implement sophisticated strategies that balance high coverage with the risk of over commitment.
The research shows that increasing savings in dynamic environments depends on commitment flexibility, the ability to change or adapt the commitment when consumption patterns change. For example, Adaptive Laddering provides such flexibility by adding commitments in frequent increments over time, allowing for multiple expiration points. Without automation, implementing Adaptive Laddering is time-consuming and error-prone. Research shows automation enables Adaptive Laddering and delivers higher ESRs than infrequent batch purchases.
This is consistent with key findings from the 451 Research study on “The role of automation in proactive cloud cost management”, which showed that organizations were heavily reliant on human decision-making and implementation for most FinOps activities. Over half (51%) of organizations managed rate optimization manually or used human-mediated processes.
“Our AWS and Google Cloud benchmarking reports point to a huge opportunity for improving rate optimization and underscore the importance of automation in FinOps,” commented Chris Cochran, Co-founder and CEO at ProsperOps. “Across clouds, organizations that diversify commitment strategies and leverage automation for continuous, data-driven optimization achieve higher ESRs.”
ProsperOps recently expanded its Autonomous Discount Management (ADM) offering to support Azure database services (Azure SQL Database, Azure Database for MySQL, and Azure Database for PostgreSQL). With this new capability, FinOps teams can automatically maximize savings and flexibility across Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud with ProsperOps.
What’s Next for Rate Optimization Benchmarking Reports
ProsperOps is developing benchmarking reports based on usage, ESR, coverage, and related metrics, with the first release planned for early 2026. Next year, the company will also expand its rate optimization insights to Microsoft Azure. This will offer organizations rate optimization insights for each of the major public clouds.
About ProsperOps
ProsperOps is the leading FinOps Automation Platform for cloud cost optimization on Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. Eliminating waste and achieving cost savings goals is challenging when cloud usage is elastic but commitments are inelastic. Founded in 2018, ProsperOps automates and synchronizes rate optimizations with workload optimizations, eliminating waste, reducing costs and risk, and improving efficiency for FinOps teams. Customers achieve world-class Effective Savings Rates, lower Commitment Lock-In Risk, and maximize flexibility with ProsperOps’ intelligent algorithms.
ProsperOps is a founding member of the FinOps Foundation, a FinOps-certified platform, Google Advantage Partner, AWS Cloud Management Tool Competency & ISV-Accelerate Partner, Microsoft ISV Success Partner, and 2021 Gartner Cool Vendor in Cloud Computing.
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Contact Information
Alyssa Newby
PANBlast for ProsperOps
[email protected]
(317) 806-1900 x122
SOURCE: ProsperOps
