Archera Pricing and What Guaranteed Reserved Instances Cost on AWS Marketplace

Archera charges nothing for its software. The platform, forecasting, native one- and three-year commitment purchases, the API and the AI agent are free, and its AWS Marketplace listing prices the platform at $0.00 a month. You pay only when you buy a Guaranteed Commitment, an insured Reserved Instance or Savings Plan, and then the charge is a premium set by service and term. The only fixed list prices Archera publishes are for Custom Reporting, from $925 to $5,000 a month.

We read the figures here on 19 October 2026 from archera.ai/pricing and from the pricing data behind four Archera listings on AWS Marketplace, all sold under the seller name Archera. The free part is easy to confirm. The part that decides your bill, the premium on a guaranteed commitment, is not on any public page, so this guide sets out what Archera does publish, what it leaves out, and how to compare a quote with ProsperOps, Zesty and the other vendors that manage AWS commitments for a fee.

How much does Archera cost?

Archera costs $0 for the platform and for native commitments, and a premium on each Guaranteed Commitment you choose to buy. Its pricing page states that there is no software fee, no percentage of your cloud spend, and no contractual lock-in. Optional Custom Reporting is a separate monthly subscription at $925, $2,500 or $5,000.

Read the premium line carefully. A price of $0.01 per unit does not mean a guaranteed commitment costs a cent. It means the premium is metered to AWS in one-cent units, so a $1,200 premium shows up as 120,000 units. The listing tells you how Archera bills through your AWS invoice. It does not tell you the rate.

Is Archera free?

Yes, for the software. Archera's pricing page is headed "The software is free," and the free tier covers cost visibility, usage forecasting, native commitment management, an AI agent, full API and MCP access, and the open-source CUDly command-line tool. Buying ordinary one- and three-year Reserved Instances or Savings Plans through Archera carries no premium.

That makes Archera unusual in this category. Most vendors that manage commitments take a share of the savings on every commitment they touch, including ones you would have bought anyway. Archera only earns money on the insured product. If you use it as a free planning tool and buy native commitments, you pay AWS for the commitments and nothing to Archera, and you also carry the full term risk yourself, exactly as you would buying from the AWS console.

How much is the Archera premium on Guaranteed Reserved Instances?

Archera does not publish a single premium rate. Its pricing page says premiums are "always a share of the savings the commitment generates," that shorter, more flexible terms carry a higher premium and longer terms a lower one, and that premiums "vary by service as well as by term." Exact per-service rates require a login.

What you get instead is a quote at the point of purchase. Archera says that before you buy you will see an estimated premium and your projected net savings on the specific commitment you are considering. That is the number to take into a comparison. Here is what the guaranteed products do for that premium, according to Archera's own listings:

• Who buys the commitment. Archera purchases and manages the Reserved Instance or Savings Plan directly in your AWS account and absorbs the duration risk on its balance sheet.
• Release Guarantee. You can have a Guaranteed Commitment removed from your account in as little as 30 days after purchase.
• Rebate Guarantee. If you do not use what you committed to, Archera refunds the underutilized portion.
• Coverage. EC2, Lambda, Fargate, RDS, ElastiCache, OpenSearch, Redshift, SageMaker and other AWS services with commitment pricing, on one- and three-year terms, plus Guaranteed Savings Plans and Guaranteed Committed Use Discounts for Google Cloud.
• Who backs it. The guarantees are insured through an AM Best A+ rated insurance carrier.

A separate listing aimed at generative AI migrations describes two shapes of the same product. The 30-Day GRI lets you commit 30 days at a time during a migration and stay refund-eligible for the rest of the underlying three-year term, which suits GPU fleets moving to p5, p4d or g6 instances. The 1-Year GRI asks for a 12-month lock-in in exchange for a deeper net discount that Archera says typically beats the AWS one-year No Upfront rate, and stays rebate-eligible for the remaining two years.

What does Archera Custom Reporting cost?

Archera Custom Reporting costs $925, $2,500 or $5,000 a month on AWS Marketplace, sold on monthly terms and non-refundable. It is the only Archera product with a fixed list price, and it is optional: the free platform already includes cost visibility, attribution and forecasting.

The package joins business data such as sales and product usage to your cloud cost data, so you can build unit economics, margin and cost of goods sold reports, tag coverage dashboards and migration views. It is aimed at finance and product teams that need cloud cost per customer or per feature. If what you need is team-level showback and a monthly cost report, a flat-priced reporting tool is cheaper than $11,100 a year; CostAnalyst's published plans start at $59 a month billed yearly.

How is Archera billed?

Archera bills guarantee premiums monthly through your cloud provider's marketplace, or directly by credit card or bank account. Billing through AWS Marketplace has one practical benefit, which Archera points out: the premiums can burn down an enterprise commitment, meaning they count toward an AWS Enterprise Discount Program or Private Pricing Agreement.

For finance, the premium arrives as a metered line on the AWS invoice rather than as a separate vendor bill. That is convenient, and it is also easy to lose. Tag the line to the team that owns the covered workload, and when the invoice is paid, match each marketplace charge to your bank statement so the premium does not end up in an unallocated bucket.

Archera vs ProsperOps pricing

ProsperOps charges a Savings Share, a small percentage of the savings it realizes on the commitments it manages, and does not publish the percentage. Archera charges no software fee and a premium only on insured commitments. Neither publishes a rate, so compare them on net savings for the same month of your own usage, not on headline percentages.

The structural difference matters more than the price. ProsperOps reduces lock-in by blending Savings Plans and Reserved Instances and laddering terms, but the commitments are still yours. Archera insures the commitment, so the vendor takes the loss if usage falls. ProsperOps covers AWS, Azure and Google Cloud; Archera's guaranteed products cover AWS and Google Cloud. ProsperOps has also changed hands: Flexera announced its acquisition on 6 January 2026. Our ProsperOps pricing breakdown covers the Savings Share and exit fees in detail.

An illustration, not a quote: a team whose commitments save $10,000 a month would pay Zesty $2,500 in savings share plus the $250 platform fee, and CloudKeeper $1,800. Archera would charge nothing on any native commitments in that portfolio and a premium only on the part you choose to insure. The full field, with who each vendor suits, is in our guide to ProsperOps alternatives, and the Zesty rate card is broken down in Zesty pricing.

Is the Archera premium worth paying?

The premium is worth paying when the value of being able to walk away is larger than the premium. That is the case during a migration, a re-architecture, a GPU generation change, or any stretch where you cannot forecast usage three years out. It is rarely worth paying on a steady baseline you would have covered with a three-year Savings Plan anyway.

A workable approach is to split the portfolio. Cover the floor of your usage, the compute you are confident will still run in three years, with native commitments, which Archera buys at no premium. Insure only the band above the floor that might disappear. Before you decide where the floor sits, look at twelve months of hourly usage and your current coverage and utilization; if you already own commitments sitting idle, that is a sign the floor is lower than you think. Our explainer on Reserved Instances vs Savings Plans covers which instrument fits which workload, and Database Savings Plans pricing covers the newer database option.

Questions to ask Archera before you sign

• What is the premium as a percentage of savings on my coverage? Get it per service and per term, for the exact commitments in the proposal.
• What baseline is the savings measured against? On-demand rates, your current effective rate, or something else.
• How does a release work in practice? How much notice, which portion is refunded, and whether a partial release is possible.
• What happens to running guaranteed commitments if we stop using Archera? Ownership, the remaining premium and who manages them.
• Which listing will we buy through, and does it count toward our EDP? Confirm with your AWS account team as well.
• Does the generative AI migration product apply to our GPU fleet? If you are moving to p5 or g6 instances, ask for the 30-Day and 1-Year GRI terms side by side.

Get the answers in writing. The Marketplace terms say fees are non-cancellable and non-refundable, so the premium schedule you agree to is the one you will pay.

How to size your commitments before you buy

Whichever vendor buys the commitment, the decision rests on two numbers you should own yourself: how much of your on-demand spend is steady enough to commit, and how much of what you already committed is going unused. CostAnalyst reads your AWS, Azure and Google Cloud billing exports read-only and shows both, next to idle resources, SaaS spend and team-level allocation. It does not buy or insure commitments, so it has no stake in how much you commit. See how AWS commitment coverage is reported, or run a free analysis of your own billing export and see the coverage gap in dollars before you request an Archera quote.

The short version

Archera's platform is free, native commitments carry no premium, and Custom Reporting lists at $925, $2,500 or $5,000 a month. The cost that matters, the premium on an insured Guaranteed Commitment, depends on service and term and is shown only when you are about to buy. Treat it as the price of an exit option: worth it on usage you cannot forecast, not on a stable floor. Compare it on net savings against ProsperOps, Spot Eco at 10 percent, CloudKeeper at 18 percent and Zesty at 25 percent, and size your coverage from your own billing data first.