- Which AWS support plans provide 24×7 access to customer service?
- Is it by phone or chat?
- What if I can’t tell if the problem is my instance or the application logic?
In this piece, we’ll be taking a look at AWS’s 5 support plans, answering all these questions and more.
For each plan, we’ll list core features, the kind of businesses that use each plan, and their ideal application. We’ll be covering:
- Basic support (not always shown in support documentation as it’s given as default, but worth a look)
- Developer support
- Business support
- Enterprise On-Ramp support
- Enterprise support
- And finally, those instances where none of the above will cut it (which doesn’t always mean paying more)
AWS Basic Support
Core features:
- Free for all AWS accounts
- 24/7 access to account and billing support
- Access to AWS documentation, whitepapers, forums
- Limited AWS Trusted Advisor checks (7 core checks)
- AWS Personal Health Dashboard
Who it’s best for:
Individuals or small teams experimenting with AWS services.
Ideal use case:
You’re testing AWS or running a personal project and don’t need technical support.
AWS Developer support plan
Core features:
- Starts at $29/month (or 3% of monthly AWS usage)
- Business-hours email access to AWS Support
- General architectural guidance
- Limited AWS Trusted Advisor checks
- Intended for non-production environments
Who it’s best for:
Developers experimenting or testing applications in AWS.
Ideal use case:
You’re developing a prototype or staging environment and want AWS guidance without needing 24/7 support.
AWS Business support plan
Core features:
- Starts at $100/month (percentage-based pricing)
- 24/7 access to AWS Support via phone, chat, and email
- Full AWS Trusted Advisor checks
- AWS Support API
- Contextual architectural guidance
- Third-party software interoperability guidance
- Access to AWS Support App in Slack
Who it’s best for:
Organisations running production workloads in AWS.
Ideal use case:
You’re running a live e-commerce site or SaaS product and want fast, 24/7 support if something breaks at 3 a.m.
Enterprise On-Ramp support plan
Core Features:
- Starts at $5,500/month or 10% of monthly usage (whichever is higher)
- 24/7 access to AWS Support via phone, chat, and email
- Prioritised response times (critical cases < 30 min)
- Pool of Technical Account Managers (TAMs) providing proactive architectural guidance
- Infrastructure Event Management (1 per year)
- Access to Support Automation Workflows
- AWS Countdown engagement included annually
- Access to AWS Support App in Slack
Who it’s best for:
Organisations rapidly expanding their AWS footprint who may not quite be ready for enterprise level.
Ideal use case:
You’ve just launched a new customer-facing product and sign-ups are coming in thick and fast.
Enterprise support plan
Core features:
- Starts at $15,000/month
- 24/7 access to AWS Support via phone, chat, and email
- Designated Technical Account Manager (TAM)
- Business-critical response times < 15 minutes
- White-glove case management
- Infrastructure Event Management
- Proactive architectural reviews
- Monthly service reviews and reports
- AWS Incident Detection & Response (additional fee)
- Access to AWS Support App in Slack
Who it’s best for:
Enterprises running business and/or mission-critical workloads that cannot tolerate downtime. There are many companies for whom that 15 minutes could be quite costly.
Ideal use case:
You’re a global SaaS company with enterprise clients relying on your service 24/7. Downtime is not an option.
What about what your AWS support plan doesn’t cover?
Even AWS enterprise support is limited to your cloud environment. And in a world where problems arise from complex interactions between environment, application and 3rd-party services, this won’t always cut it.
You’re welcome to call your AWS support team, CMS support team and whoever else is answering in your time of need, but there is a better way than herding cats.
How can we help
At Just After Midnight, we offer outsourced, full-stack support. That means our teams of cloud support engineers, .NET developers and incident managers draw up detailed runbooks based on a holistic understanding of your solution.
That means the buck stops with us. We’re the one-stop support service for even the most distributed applications.
And, as an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner and cloud-native MSP, we’re no slouch when it comes to AWS environment-only issues, too. Read more about our work supporting AWS customers and mission-critical stacks right here, or find out more about our 24/7 AWS support service.
