What Goes Into a Proposal
Cloud Capital combines four data sources to build each commitment proposal:1. AWS Cost and Usage Report (CUR)
Your CUR data is the foundation. Cloud Capital analyzes your recent billing history to identify committable spend — the portion of your usage that matches commitment-eligible resource types (primarily compute and database workloads). This establishes an accurate baseline of what you’re actually running and spending today.2. Your Forecast
The forecast you’ve built in Cloud Capital — your Cost Layers, growth projections, and projection methodology — tells us where your spend is expected to go. A commitment purchased today should reflect your anticipated usage 12 to 36 months from now, not just usage over the last 90 days. A rising forecast means committing to more; a stabilizing or declining forecast means keeping more flexibility.3. Business Metrics
Business metrics — such as active customer counts, revenue, or transaction volumes — allow Cloud Capital to correlate cloud cost growth with the underlying business drivers. When your business plan projects growth or contraction, that signal flows into your forecast and directly shapes the commitment proposal. This is something AWS cannot see and does not factor in.4. Engineering Initiatives
Planned infrastructure changes — migrations, deprecations, new product launches, right-sizing efforts — can significantly affect future spend. Engineering Initiatives let you encode those planned changes into the forecast so that commitments aren’t purchased against spend that is about to disappear, or undersized for spend that is about to grow.Why This Is Better Than AWS Native Recommendations
AWS provides its own commitment recommendations directly in the Cost Explorer and Billing Console. Those recommendations are based entirely on your historical usage — typically the past 7, 30, or 60 days. Cloud Capital’s proposals start with that same historical foundation but layer in everything AWS cannot see:| AWS Recommendations | Cloud Capital Proposals | |
|---|---|---|
| Historical CUR data | Yes | Yes |
| Forecast (Cost Layers, growth projections) | No | Yes |
| Business metric correlations | No | Yes |
| Engineering initiatives and planned changes | No | Yes |
| Reviewed and approved with your team | No | Yes |
Term Selection
Each commitment proposal includes a recommended term mix — the balance between 1-year and 3-year commitments. Longer terms deliver deeper discounts; shorter terms preserve more flexibility as your environment evolves. The recommended term mix is based on the confidence level in your forecast horizon, your risk tolerance, and the stability of the underlying workloads. Cloud Capital reviews the term recommendation with you before any purchase — you can adjust the mix based on your own business context. For the full four-step commitment ladder and how coverage is built over time, see Commitment Proposal & Onboarding.Your Role
The quality of proposals depends on the quality of your inputs. Cloud Capital’s recommendation is only as good as the forecast it’s built on. To get the most accurate proposals:- Keep your Cost Layers up to date and mapped to real business boundaries
- Update business metrics regularly as your business plan evolves
- Add Engineering Initiatives when significant changes are planned
- Review your forecast before each weekly review meeting during ladder-up