Amazon has announced two new support plans for its cloud service EC2, called Bronze and Platinum. It also announced that it has reduced the prices for its existing offerings Silver and Gold. Also the maximum initial response time has been lowered overall.
The Bronze plan is aimed at individual developers and costs $49 per month, giving developers the ability to submit troubletickets using the same web-based ticketing system currently in use for the Silver and Gold plans. Also a Platinum plan is introduced which is intended for enterprise customers and is priced at 10% of the EC2 usage with a $15K monthly minimum.
Amazon has also reduced the usage-based pricing for the Silver and Gold support plans by 50%, which is effective starting January 1 this year. The minimum cost, $100 per month for Silver and $400 per month for Gold will remain the same though.
The maximum initial response time for normal severity cases has been reduced from 24 business hours to 12 business hours. The maximum initial response time for low severity cases has been reduced from 48 business hours to 24 business hours. The Platinum plan includes assignment of an Technical Account Manager (TAM), with response to critical tickets within 15 minutes and urgent tickets within an hour.
The usage-based fee for the already existing Silver support plan is now 5% of the usage instead of 10% and the usage based fee for the Gold support plan now starts at 10% of the usage instead of 20%, with further reductions in the percentage (all the way down to 5%) as the EC2 usage grows.