Commitments and discounts
Reservation and savings-plan coverage, per-commitment used-versus-unused utilization, and realized discount against list price.
Commitments are usually the largest single lever on a cloud bill and the least visible. Flux reports them from charge-level billing data rather than estimating.
[!NOTE] Requires FOCUS billing data This area depends on charge-level billing exports. See Connecting your cloud. Without them the section is hidden rather than shown with hollow numbers.
Coverage #
Commitment coverage is the proportion of eligible usage cost covered by a commitment rather than paid on demand:
coverage = committed effective cost / (committed + on-demand effective cost)
Low coverage on steady baseline usage means money left on the table. High coverage on volatile usage means risk of paying for capacity you stop needing. Neither is universally good, which is why Flux reports the number rather than scoring it.
Utilization #
Coverage says how much usage a commitment absorbed. Utilization says how much of the commitment you actually used:
| Column | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Used | Effective cost of usage the commitment absorbed |
| Unused | Effective cost of commitment capacity that went unused |
| Utilization | Used ÷ (used + unused) |
Unused commitment is money already spent with nothing to show for it. A commitment at 100% coverage and 60% utilization is oversized.
Used-versus-unused state is read per charge from the billing export, so this is measurement rather than modelling.
Discount realization #
Charge-level data carries several cost measures, and the gaps between them are informative:
| Measure | Meaning |
|---|---|
| List cost | Public price for the same usage |
| Contracted cost | Your negotiated price |
| Effective cost | After commitment amortization |
| Billed cost | What appeared on the invoice |
Flux reports realized discount — list minus effective — as an absolute figure and a percentage, in total and broken down by service.
That per-service breakdown is the useful one. A low discount percentage on a large service is a negotiation target; a high one confirms an existing agreement is working.
What Flux does not do here #
Flux reports on commitments you hold. It does not currently recommend what to buy — quantities, terms, scope, or break-even.
That is a deliberate boundary. Purchase planning requires modelling future usage against pricing options, and Flux has no deterministic engine for it yet. Rather than have an AI assistant improvise a seven-figure purchase plan, the assistant is explicitly instructed to state the limitation instead. See How the assistant is bounded.