There are 5 tiers to AWS Support Plans: Basic, Developer, Business, Enterprise On-Ramp, and Enterprise. Depending on the plan you select, you receive different support resources.

For example, only Enterprise level plans provide Technical Account Manager (TAM) and Support Concierge access. TAMs provide proactive best practices guidance, and help you develop and run AWS solutions. Support Concierge provides account and billing analysis to help cut costs.

The pricing range from Free to “starting at” $15,000/mo, so there is definitely a big difference in pricing.

For the support you receive, Business is probably the best bet for many of the support plan related questions, when you consider the price ($100/mo vs $15,000/mo for Enterprise) and the support SLA of 24×7 support with 1 hour response to urgent support cases.

Support Plans are important part of Certified Cloud Practitioner Exam, so it’s important that you can identify the different levels, and what kind of services each level entitles you to.

These two pages provided by AWS are critical to go through:

• Compare AWS Support Plans (AWS)
• AWS Support Plan Pricing (AWS)

This is a VERY bare-bones comparison between the different support plans, but I highly recommend you check out the above pages to get the more in-depth information for the certification exam (or to make a decision on which support plan to choose for your organization).

Basic

• Cost: Free
• Customer service for account and billing questions only
• Access to AWS Community Forums

Developer

• Cost: Higher of $29/mo or 3% of monthly usage (scales with use)
• Use: Experimenting with AWS
• Primary Contact can ask technical questions through Support Center
  • SLA: 12-14 hours at local business hours

Business

• Cost: Higher of $100/mo or 10% of monthly usage for first $10k, 7% for $10~80k, 5% for $80~250k, 3% of $250k+ (scales with use)
• Use: Production use of AWS
• Full access to AWS Trusted Advisor for optimizing infrastructure
• AWS Support API access for support case automation
• Unlimited number of contacts can open cases
  • SLA: 24×7 support via phone, e-mail, chat
    • 1 hour response time to urgent support cases
  • Provides support with common 3rd party applications

Enterprise-On-Ramp

• Cost: Higher of $5,000/mo or 10% of monthly usage
• Use: Production and/or business-critical use of AWS
• Comes with all the features of the Business Plan
• Technical Account Manager (TAM): provides proactive best practice guidance, and helps develop and run AWS solutions
• Support Concierge: billing and account analysisUnlimited number of contacts can open cases
  • SLA: 24×7 support via phone, e-mail, chat
    • 30 min response to critical support cases (with priority)

Enterprise

• Cost: Higher of $15,000/mo or 10% of monthly usage for first $150k (scales with use)
• Use: Mission-critical use of AWS
• Comes with all the features of the Enterprise On-Ramp Plan
• Technical Account Manager (TAM): provides proactive best practice guidance, and helps develop and run AWS solutions (assigned a single TAM)
• Support Concierge: billing and account analysis
• Unlimited number of contacts can open cases
  • SLA: 24×7 support via phone, e-mail, chat
    • 15 min response to critical support cases (with priority)