Why CFOs can't afford to miss what AWS just did

For years, CFOs didn’t have to worry about AWS commitments. There was always an escape hatch. A vendor. A clever workaround. A buffer built into someone else’s system. 

Those days are over. 

The new AWS policy makes that kind of thinking obsolete. No more pooled commitments. No more sub-account shuffling. No more discount-sharing safety net. Starting June 1, 2025, cloud commitments are becoming exactly what they sound like: commitments. 

That shift isn’t a technical nuance. It’s a financial reckoning. 

If your forecast still treats cloud spend as flexible or deferrable, you’re not planning. You’re gambling with what might be one of the largest line items in your cost structure. When the music stops on June 1st, many finance leaders will find themselves holding long-term commitments they can’t optimize away. 

What Changed and Why It Matters 

Let’s decode what AWS actually did: They’ve declared that Reserved Instances (RIs) and Savings Plans (SPs) must now apply to a single end customer only. No more sharing discounts across multiple companies under a reseller or partner umbrella. This isn’t a minor terms update—it’s AWS asserting control over how cloud economics function. 

Behind the scenes, vendors like DoiT International, Zesty, and Spot.io built entire business models around pooling commitments across clients. If one customer’s usage dipped, another’s could rise to absorb the difference. That system worked—until AWS decided it no longer made economic sense. 

AWS isn’t being punitive—they’re protecting their infrastructure economics. Their capital expenditures are nearing $100B annually, with the majority going toward data centers and hardware that must be purchased well before it generates revenue. As CEO Andy Jassy noted, AWS must “procure data center capacity ahead of when they monetize it.” Commitment-based discounts were designed to provide those demand signals, not to enable arbitrage. 

This change signals a new phase of cloud maturity—one where the cost structure must catch up to the strategic role of cloud. AWS is asking a simple question: If cloud is so mission-critical to your business, why aren’t you willing to commit directly? 

The Cloud Cost Illusion We’ve Been Living In 

Cloud spend was never managed like other major business expenses. You wouldn’t commit to a 36-month office lease with no sublet clause or cancellation rights—but you’ve been doing that with cloud. Commitments looked like savings, but behaved like liabilities. 

Consider this paradox: We’ve treated cloud as uniquely flexible (“elastic resources on demand”) while simultaneously locking ourselves into multi-year obligations to get pricing that makes our unit economics work. 

Vendors offered flexibility that created the illusion of optionality. The cottage industry of cloud cost optimization—built on arbitrage via marketplaces, pooled commitments, and sub-account shifting—let us maintain the comfortable fiction that we could always find efficiencies later if growth slowed. 

The fallout? CFOs made assumptions based on a system that no longer exists. Finance teams built forecasts on “we can optimize later” logic. Engineering spend was treated as variable when large portions were actually fixed. Board decks showed upside scenarios where cloud costs beautifully scaled with revenue—but downside models conveniently assumed minimal commitment exposure. 

Now, all that risk is reverting to the balance sheet. No way to offload excess usage. No exit if usage dips. Real P&L exposure if your product roadmap pivots away from compute-intensive features. 

The Risk Isn’t Spend but Exposure 

The dollar amount of your cloud bill isn’t the problem—it’s the inflexibility baked into that number. 

You’re likely sitting on multi-year obligations with no off-ramp, no buffer, and no model that reflects your current growth trajectory. This creates stranded cost risk—especially dangerous in flat or down forecast scenarios. If you’ve committed to $10 million in cloud spend over three years based on 30% annual growth, what happens if growth is only 10%? Or worse, if usage plateaus? 

And if your vendors were using flexibility AWS just banned, you’re now exposed to both margin erosion and operational scramble. Some vendors are reportedly sitting on nine-figure obligations they can no longer effectively distribute across customers. The risk is particularly acute for cost optimization platforms whose entire business was built on pooling and resale. If they can’t apply those discounts to your usage come June, expect either price increases or vendor insolvency—neither of which will help your quarterly forecast. 

Worse still, some finance teams don’t even know how exposed they are. If you can’t answer exactly which discounts you’re receiving, which ones depend on third-party mechanisms, and what your true on-demand rate would be, you have a visibility crisis on your hands. 

What Smart CFOs Are Doing Right Now 

The best CFOs we’re seeing do four things immediately, and they’re not treating them as separate tasks but as an integrated response. They’re conducting comprehensive audits of every commitment they’ve made, both directly and through vendors. They’re understanding exactly which cloud resources are subject to long-term obligations and which assumptions about growth and usage those commitments depend on. 

These same leaders are then running rigorous downside models. Not just “what if growth slows” but explicit scenarios where product usage shifts away from compute-heavy features or where a major customer segment churns. They recognize that, unlike most financial risks, cloud commitment exposure is asymmetric—you’ve locked in the cost but not the revenue. 

Next, they’re having tough conversations with their vendors. Not just asking “are you exposed?” but getting specific commitments about how service will continue post-June and what contingency plans exist if the vendor faces financial pressure. The smartest CFOs are even preparing potential exit strategies for vendors whose models clearly violate the new AWS rules. 

Finally, they’re fundamentally rethinking cloud as a financial asset class. Not treating it like just another OpEx subscription, but structuring it like they would a lease, hedging it like currency exposure, and aligning it to concrete business outcomes like customer acquisition or feature usage. They’re installing the same governance for cloud purchases that they would for any seven-figure financial obligation. 

This Isn’t Just a Risk Moment – It’s a Leadership One 

The CFOs who navigate this well will emerge stronger. They’ll gain greater visibility into infrastructure costs, deeper alignment with engineering on roadmap-driven spend, and more trust with investors and boards. 

This is your chance to bring discipline to a spend category that’s been too loose. To install governance that puts cloud purchasing on par with other major financial commitments. To treat cloud contracts like risk assets, not passive discounts. 

The companies that win will be those where CFOs partner deeply with CTOs—where finance understands the technical nuances that drive costs, and engineering understands the financial constraints that shape strategy. When I ask CFOs about their cloud governance, too many still say, “That’s engineering’s domain.” That answer won’t cut it anymore. 

Consider this: AWS’s change forces a long-overdue discussion about who owns cloud economics in your organization. If it’s been ambiguous, this is your moment to establish clear accountability. 

Cloud Finance Is Growing Up – So Should We 

This is a turning point. Cloud cost is no longer back-of-the-envelope. It’s balance-sheet material. 

The market has matured. AWS has drawn a line. The free lunch is over. That’s not bad news—it’s a chance to operate with clarity, control, and credibility. 

What’s particularly striking is how predictable this was. Vendors built businesses on arbitraging AWS’s pricing model. AWS tolerated it until the scale became too large to ignore. Now they’re reasserting control, and we’re all scrambling to adjust. But we shouldn’t be surprised. Cloud was never meant to be a financial shell game—it was meant to be a direct commercial relationship between provider and customer. 

CFOs who move now won’t just avoid pain—they’ll lead the next phase of financial rigor in cloud-based business models. They’ll establish frameworks that extend beyond cloud to other variable-cost digital infrastructure. They’ll turn a technical footnote into strategic advantage. 

The commitment era is here. Time to start acting like it. 

Ed is the co-founder and CEO of Cloud Capital, a pioneering financial platform where he works with CFOs to help them get control of their cloud spend. A serial entrepreneur with deep experience at the intersection of software, finance, and enterprise infrastructure, Ed previously founded and scaled multiple B2B technology businesses, including the SaaS automation platform Idio, acquired by Episerver (now Optimizely). Known for his product-led approach and strategic insight, Ed is passionate about giving CFOs and operators financial control over AI-driven cloud spend. 

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