As a real life user of AWS I agree with this decision. RIs are not only a headache from a time perspective but we pay a non-trivial amount for a separate tool

As a real life user of AWS I agree with this decision. RIs are not only a headache from a time perspective but we pay a non-trivial amount for a separate tool to manage purchasing them since AWS's built in tools aren't great. Even with this tool we frequently make planning mistakes due to shifting business priorities or other reasons. Like - oh hay we have to upgrade our database instance but that needs a newer version because only the newer versions support something we need (i.e more than X GB ram). So engineering needs to modify the app to support the newer version.(Oh by the way AWS has a boatload of subtle restrictions like that.) In this case we were sitting on a RI till EOY and for some reason you can't resell RDS RIs like normal ones (another subtle restriction) so we couldn't even partially recoup costs. Sometimes if you haggle with AWS Enterprise Support you can get them to help out if you're spending the money elsewhere but it's a pain. Good luck if you don't pay for that though (which itself is 15k a year or more).