For very large cloud spenders, the standard public pricing models are just the starting point. Once an organization reaches tens of millions of dollars per year in cloud spend, direct negotiation becomes possible.
Enterprise Discount Program (EDP)
Large enterprises negotiate custom contracts directly with cloud providers like AWS, often called an Enterprise Discount Program (EDP) or a Private Pricing Agreement (PPA).
The structure is straightforward: the customer commits to spending a large total amount (e.g., $30 million over 3 years) across all cloud services. In exchange, the cloud provider applies a flat percentage discount (e.g., 10–20%) to every single invoice, stacked on top of any Savings Plan or Spot discounts already in effect.
This means a workload running on Spot instances with a Compute Savings Plan baseline could effectively receive three layers of discount simultaneously:
1. Spot discount (~70–90% off On-Demand)
2. Savings Plan discount (~66% off On-Demand for covered usage)
3. EDP discount (~10–20% off the already-discounted bill)
The Marketplace "Burn-Down" Strategy
A strategically important aspect of cloud finance is the Cloud Marketplace — an app store where you can purchase third-party software (Datadog, Snowflake, Palo Alto Networks, MongoDB Atlas, etc.) directly through your cloud provider's billing system.
Why does this matter for FinOps? Because for many EDP contracts, money spent in the Marketplace counts toward your total spend commitment.
This creates a powerful strategy: instead of paying Datadog directly via credit card (which does nothing for your EDP commitment), you pay Datadog through the AWS Marketplace. The same dollars now count toward your EDP burn-down, keeping you on track to meet your commitment and avoid penalties for under-spending.
In practice, sophisticated FinOps teams audit all SaaS vendor contracts annually and migrate as many as possible to Marketplace billing, effectively getting their EDP discount applied to their entire software stack — not just raw infrastructure.
If asked "How would you reduce cloud costs at an enterprise scale beyond just buying Savings Plans?", a strong answer covers three layers: (1) commitment-based discounts (Savings Plans/RIs) for baseline compute, (2) Spot for flexible workloads, and (3) EDP negotiation combined with Marketplace consolidation to apply discounts across the entire software portfolio. Most candidates stop at layer 1. Mentioning the Marketplace burn-down strategy signals genuine FinOps maturity.