What an AWS Partner Actually Gets You (That You Cannot Get Alone)

1. A direct, guaranteed discount on your bill

This is the simplest one and the one people find hardest to believe.

Through the AWS Solution Provider Program, we resell AWS to you. You keep everything: your AWS account, your Organization, your root access, your architecture. Nothing migrates. Nothing is rebuilt. What changes is who sends the invoice.

Our Value Added Billing program returns:

• 4% off your AWS invoice, month to month, no term commitment.
• 6% off, on a twelve-month term.

That is a guarantee, not an estimate. It applies from the first invoice, and it stacks on top of every other optimization in this article — a Savings Plan discount and a resale discount are different layers, not competing ones.

On the twelve-month term we also buy and manage your Savings Plans and Reserved Instances to hold coverage at maximum, run a FinOps review twice a year, a Well-Architected Review once a year, and one proof of concept on any AWS service.

What it costs you: nothing, and no lock-in. If you hold an existing private pricing agreement directly with AWS, we review whether it should transfer before anything moves — and we tell you if the answer is no.

2. Private pricing, negotiated properly

If your spend is large enough, AWS will negotiate a Private Pricing Agreement — a discount across services in exchange for a committed spend level over one to five years. AWS now uses "PPA" for these; you may still hear the older name, EDP.

Customers routinely try this alone, and it routinely comes out wrong. The failure is almost never the discount percentage. It is the commit structure: a ramp that assumes growth that does not arrive, a term that outlives the architecture, a shortfall clause nobody modelled, or a commitment sized against a bill that had 20% waste in it — so you have now contractually promised to keep spending on the waste.

What we bring is having been on the other side of that table. We model the commit against your real floor rather than your current bill, structure the ramp against your actual roadmap, and tell you what the shortfall exposure looks like before you sign rather than in year three.

And the honest part: not every customer and not every segment is eligible. AWS excludes certain geographies and segments — including some government customers — from parts of private pricing resale. If you fall into one of those, we will tell you plainly rather than let you discover it late, and we will still help you negotiate the agreement you can have.

3. AWS money you are eligible for and probably are not claiming

AWS funds migrations and modernization heavily. Most of that funding is only accessible through a partner, because AWS requires a partner to deliver and evidence the work. This is the category customers most often leave entirely untouched.

Migration Acceleration Program (MAP). Three phases — Assess, Mobilize, Migrate & Modernize — combining cash and credits. Commonly reported figures put the Assess phase around 5% of projected annual recurring revenue, and Mobilize and Migrate in the range of 15–25% of post-migration ARR delivered as credits, with large enterprise migrations reaching into the hundreds of thousands. AWS does not publish these openly, so treat them as indicative until we model your specific case.

Optimization and Licensing Assessment (OLA). Free, and the most under-used program on this list. AWS reports customers reducing Windows Server licensing costs by an average of 77% and SQL Server by 45%, with around 60% greater licence efficiency than on-premises. If you run a Microsoft estate and have not had an OLA, this is the first call to make.

Migration Evaluator. A no-cost business case built from real telemetry out of your data centre rather than a spreadsheet of guesses. It is what turns "we think cloud is cheaper" into a number your CFO will sign.

Partner Opportunity Acceleration. Funding for proofs of concept and migrations, as cash reimbursement and AWS credits. This is how a pilot gets paid for.

Well-Architected funding. Complete a review and remediate high-risk findings, and promotional credits are available to subsidise the remediation work itself.

Partner Greenfield Program. New for 2026 — a multi-year AWS co-investment approach for building out migration and modernization, generative AI, and security practices.

All AWS funding is subject to AWS eligibility criteria and approval. We tell you which programs you qualify for before we start, not after.

4. Support at partner economics

AWS Partner-Led Support lets us define the support offering rather than simply reselling AWS Support at list.

The gate is real: only Advanced or Premier Tier partners can participate. We are an Advanced Tier Services Partner, which is why we can offer this and most boutique consultancies cannot. Partners earn a base discount plus up to fifteen further percentage points based on measured case quality, case ownership, and customer satisfaction scores.

What that means for you is support with named humans who already know your architecture, at better economics than buying the equivalent tier directly — and an escalation path into AWS when it is genuinely an AWS problem.

5. Marketplace mechanics that quietly save real money

Channel Partner Private Offers. Third-party software bought through us in AWS Marketplace still draws down your AWS committed spend. You keep the commitment drawdown and get partner terms and pricing. This is one of the least understood levers in AWS procurement, and adoption has been growing at over 100% year over year for exactly that reason.

Marketplace as commitment relief. A meaningful portion of a private pricing commitment can commonly be retired through qualifying Marketplace purchases — frequently cited at around 25%. If you are carrying a commit you are struggling to consume, this is often the fastest legitimate route to consuming it.

New in 2026: professional services in Marketplace can now be sold on time-and-materials, milestone, or genuinely outcome-based pricing, and express private offers deliver credits next-day. An engagement can be structured to pay against results rather than hours, through a procurement path you have already approved.

6. Someone who owns the commitment position

Savings Plans and Reserved Instances are the largest single lever on most AWS bills, and also the easiest to get wrong — commit to the peak instead of the floor, buy three years on a one-year strategy, or simply let a commitment expire unnoticed and watch the bill silently revert to On-Demand.

On our twelve-month program we buy and manage that position for you and carry the risk of getting it right. We have written the full mechanics up in a three-part series: the instruments and their trade-offs, how to choose and monitor coverage, and what it looks like at four company sizes.