AWS Consulting Services: Who Is Actually Paying for the Work?

Every AWS consulting services proposal we have been shown this year has a number at the bottom, and that number is not what the work costs. Part of it is being paid by AWS.

That is not a scandal. Partner funding is a published programme with published rules, and we use it too. But money arrives attached to an outcome, and the outcome AWS funds is more workload running on AWS. Nobody funds deletion.

So here is the position. Before you compare two quotes, find out which parts of each one AWS is subsidising, because that tells you which parts of your problem the proposal was shaped around.

Why is the AWS consulting services quote cheaper than the work in it?

Because a second party is contributing, and AWS is open about the mechanism. Its partner funding benefits page says Migration Acceleration Program funds "support you with migrations or modernizations of any size or workload to AWS, at each phase of the customer's migration journey", and that a partner can "receive cash or AWS promotional credits to originate opportunities, accelerate customer migration or modernizations workloads to AWS and grow your Migration practices on AWS".

Read the verbs. Originate, accelerate, grow. Every one describes moving more workload onto AWS, which is what you would expect a vendor to pay for and what to keep in mind while you read a recommendation.

The plumbing is documented too. AWS Partner Central's guide to fund requests states that partners "may receive funding in the form of cash or AWS Promotional Credits depending on the specific funding option". Funding is requested per opportunity, per programme, and approved before the work starts.

Which means "is this engagement funded" is not a secret question. Your consultant knows the answer before the kick-off call. Ask for it.

What is AWS paying, and to whom?

Two different things, and teams run them together constantly.

The first is money to the partner: cash or credits that land on their side and lower what they need to charge for the engagement to be worth running. You see it as a discount, or as an assessment offered free.

The second is promotional credits applied to your own account. AWS documents that charge type plainly in its Cost Explorer filter reference: Credit is "any AWS credits that are applied to your account", which is a reduction in your future AWS usage cost and not a reduction in the consultant's invoice.

The distinction bites at renewal. A credit-funded platform feels cheap for exactly as long as the credits last, and the run rate underneath has not moved. Credits expire. When they do, the bill you were always running arrives in full, and it tends to land in the same quarter as the proposal for phase two. We have sat in a review where the cost chart had been drawn net of credits for a year and nobody in the room knew it.

Check it rather than assume it. Charge type is a dimension in Cost Explorer, so the credit line is one query away.

Which parts of the job has nobody funded?

Write out the work a regulated company on AWS actually needs done, then mark which items increase AWS consumption.

• Moving an application to AWS. Funded.
• Modernising it once it is there. Funded.
• Retiring the application instead of moving it. Not funded.
• Finding the three environments nobody has logged into since March and deleting them. Not funded.
• Deciding a workload stays where it is because of data residency. Not funded.
• Cutting the compliance line items nobody chose. Not funded.

Nobody is lying to you here. It is an incentive, and an incentive shows up as the gap between what a proposal is thorough about and what it is brief about. A funded migration plan carries a careful wave schedule and a thin paragraph on decommissioning, and that thin paragraph is where your run rate for the next three years gets decided. We went through those line items in what a fintech can cut without failing an audit, and the retire and retain decisions in what has to exist before cutover.

The fix is dull and it works. Put the unfunded items into the statement of work as named deliverables with dates, next to the funded ones. A consultant worth hiring will agree. The one who negotiates hardest over the decommissioning paragraph has told you something useful.

Who is your seller of record?

Ask early, because the answer decides who holds your billing relationship.

AWS's Solution Provider Program "enables partners to resell and deliver AWS services as part of their own offerings" and "allows partners to directly manage customer billing". If your consultant is a solution provider and you buy AWS through them, you are their customer rather than Amazon's. That can be perfectly fine. Reseller billing is common, occasionally cheaper, and a good reseller carries real support value.

It changes three things worth settling before signature. Any private pricing or discount sits in their agreement rather than yours. Your support contract is with them. And on the day you leave you have a billing migration on top of an account migration. What you should own when they leave covers the account side; the billing side is usually the part people find out about last.

You can check where you stand without asking anyone. Cost Explorer carries a legal entity dimension, the seller of record for each service, and the same filter reference lists "Amazon Web Services India Private Limited" as "the local Indian entity that acts as a reseller for AWS services in India". Buy direct in India and that is what the query returns. Buy through a partner and you will see something else, or you cannot run the query at all, because the payer account is theirs.

What does the RBI expect you to have checked?

If you are a bank or an NBFC, the Managing Risks in Outsourcing Directions, 2025 put this on you rather than on the vendor. Paragraph 9 is the whole principle in a sentence: outsourcing "does not diminish its obligations, and those of its Board and Senior Management, who have the ultimate responsibility for the outsourced activity".

The diligence clause asks you to assess "the capability of the service provider to comply with obligations in the outsourcing agreement on an ongoing basis", and it applies "while considering or renewing" the arrangement. Renewal is in that sentence deliberately. A second statement of work deserves the same reading as the first and almost never gets it.

On conflicts, read the text rather than a summary of it. The IT services chapter bars a service provider that is "owned or controlled by any director, or key managerial personnel, or approver of the outsourcing arrangement", or their relatives. That is an ownership rule. It says nothing about a vendor being paid by the cloud provider whose services it recommends, and no inspection is going to raise the point on your behalf. Which makes it your diligence, in your own file, or nobody's. The contract clauses are in our paragraph by paragraph post, and the tier and badge claims in what an AWS partner badge actually proves.

What can you check on Monday?

Twenty minutes, one API and three questions.

Cost Explorer's GetCostAndUsage accepts both LEGAL_ENTITY_NAME and RECORD_TYPE as group-by dimensions, so one call tells you who sells you AWS and another tells you how much of last month was credit rather than spend.

aws ce get-cost-and-usage --region us-east-1 \
  --time-period Start=2026-08-01,End=2026-09-01 \
  --granularity MONTHLY --metrics UnblendedCost \
  --group-by Type=DIMENSION,Key=LEGAL_ENTITY_NAME

aws ce get-cost-and-usage --region us-east-1 \
  --time-period Start=2026-08-01,End=2026-09-01 \
  --granularity MONTHLY --metrics UnblendedCost \
  --group-by Type=DIMENSION,Key=RECORD_TYPE

Run the second one across the last six months. If the credit line is large and shrinking, you already know which month the real number turns up in, and you can tell your board before it does.

Then send three questions, in writing, to whoever is proposing the work. Is any part of this engagement funded by AWS, and under which programme? Will promotional credits be applied to our accounts, how many, and when do they expire? Are you the seller of record for our AWS usage, or do we buy direct?

None of those is a hostile question and none should take a day to answer. How fast the reply comes back is itself information.

When is a funded engagement the honest answer?

Most of the time. Take the money.

A funded assessment is usually the cheapest serious look at your estate you will ever get, and funding does not make the engineers worse. If you are genuinely migrating, this is what the programme exists for, and refusing it on principle costs you real budget for no gain. We put clients through funded programmes when they qualify, and we would think less of a partner who did not know how.

The failure is narrower than the worry. It turns up when a funding programme becomes the shape of the whole relationship, so that every phase of a three-year plan happens to be a phase somebody else pays for, and the year whose right answer was to move less and delete more never gets written down. Fund the migration. Buy the retirement separately.

The short version

• Ask which programme is funding the engagement, by name. Funding is requested per opportunity and approved in advance, so the answer exists before your kick-off call.
• Separate money paid to the partner from promotional credits applied to your account. The second is a discount on your own future bill, it expires, and it belongs on the chart your board reads.
• Name the unfunded work in the statement of work: decommissioning, retirement, and the workloads that are staying where they are.
• Settle your seller of record before you sign rather than on the way out, and keep any private pricing in an agreement with your name on it.

This is engineering guidance, not legal advice. Regulations and their annexures are amended over time; read the current text and take your compliance position from counsel.