AWS Support Plans

When something breaks at 2 a.m. in your AWS account, the speed and quality of help you get depends on which AWS Support plan you are paying for. AWS sells four tiers — Basic, Developer, Business, and Enterprise — and they differ in how fast AWS promises to respond, who is allowed to open a support case, and how much of the automated advice tool (Trusted Advisor) you can see. Picking the right tier is a real engineering decision: too little support and you are stuck during an outage, too much and you are burning money you don’t need to spend. This page compares the tiers in plain English so you can choose well.

What “support” actually means here

AWS Support is separate from your bill for compute and storage. It is an optional add-on that buys you the right to open technical cases (asking a human AWS engineer for help) and access to tooling. Every account always gets AWS Basic Support for free — that covers billing questions, account issues, and the public documentation and forums. The paid tiers add technical help with a Service Level Agreement (SLA) — a written promise about how quickly AWS will respond.

An SLA covers response time, not resolution time. AWS promises to reply to your case within the window, not to fix your problem within it.

The four tiers compared

Feature	Basic (free)	Developer	Business	Enterprise
Monthly cost	$0	Greater of $29 or 3% of monthly AWS spend	Tiered: from $100, % of spend (sliding scale)	From $15,000, % of spend (sliding scale)
Who can open technical cases	No one (billing/account only)	One person, business hours	Unlimited people, 24/7	Unlimited people, 24/7
Case channels	None (web only for billing)	Web (email-style)	Web, phone, chat	Web, phone, chat
Trusted Advisor checks	7 core checks	7 core checks	Full set (all checks)	Full set (all checks)
Fastest response SLA	n/a	12 business hours (general)	1 hour (production down)	15 minutes (business-critical down)
Technical Account Manager (TAM)	No	No	No	Yes
Architectural guidance	No	General only	Use-case guidance	Consultative, proactive

A few terms defined:

Trusted Advisor is an AWS tool that automatically scans your account and flags problems — unused resources costing money, security groups left wide open, services close to a quota limit. On Basic and Developer you only see seven core checks (mostly security). On Business and Enterprise you see the full set across cost, performance, security, fault tolerance, and limits.
Technical Account Manager (TAM) is a named AWS engineer assigned to your account who learns your architecture and helps proactively. This is Enterprise-only.

Basic — when to use it

Basic is the default and costs nothing. It is fine for learning, side projects, and accounts that hold nothing important. You cannot open a technical case, so if a service misbehaves your only options are the documentation and community forums.

When NOT to use it: any time real users or revenue depend on the workload.

Developer — when to use it

Developer support adds the ability for one person to open technical cases during business hours, with a general response target of 12 business hours. It suits a solo developer or a small team building and testing something that is not yet live.

When NOT to use it: production. There is no 24/7 access and no phone, so a weekend outage leaves you waiting.

Business — the practical minimum for production

Business support is the tier most production workloads should be on. It is the lowest tier that gives unlimited contacts, 24/7 access by web, phone, and chat, a 1-hour SLA for production-down cases, and the full set of Trusted Advisor checks.

Gotcha: Business support is the practical minimum for any production workload. It is the only affordable tier that combines 24/7 technical case access with the complete Trusted Advisor check set. Developer support’s business-hours-only window means a Friday-night outage may not get a human reply until Monday.

Cost is a sliding percentage of your monthly AWS usage, starting at $100/month and decreasing as a percentage as you spend more. For a workload billing $5,000/month, Business support typically adds a few hundred dollars — cheap insurance against a multi-hour outage.

Enterprise — when to use it

Enterprise (and the slightly lighter Enterprise On-Ramp) adds a 15-minute SLA for business-critical outages, a dedicated TAM, and proactive architectural and operational reviews. It starts around $15,000/month, so it makes sense only for large, mission-critical estates where minutes of downtime cost more than the support fee.

When NOT to use it: small or early-stage workloads — you will pay for a TAM and 15-minute SLA you don’t yet need.

How to view and change your plan

Console steps

Sign in to the AWS Management Console as the root user or an IAM user with billing permissions.
In the top navigation, open the account menu (your account name, top-right) and choose Support Center, or go directly to the AWS Support console.
In the left navigation, choose Support plans.
Review the comparison cards, then choose Review on the plan you want and confirm the change. Upgrades take effect immediately.

Opening a support case (CLI)

Once you are on Developer or higher, you can open cases programmatically. The Support API is only callable on paid plans.

aws support create-case \
  --subject "Production EC2 instance unreachable" \
  --service-code "amazon-elastic-compute-cloud-linux" \
  --severity-code "urgent" \
  --category-code "instance-issue" \
  --communication-body "Instance i-0a1b2c3d4e5f stopped responding to SSH and HTTP at 02:14 UTC." \
  --language "en"

Output:

{
    "caseId": "case-123456789012-muen-2026-0a1b2c3d4e5f"
}

You can list your support tiers’ available severity levels too:

aws support describe-severity-levels --language en