We have a Quick Sight account with Annual Author Plans. At the top of the page, it says we have 103 annual Author commitments. Going through the list, I can see that 81 of them are live and set to auto-renew, which is ideal as this is how many we need. However, I can see that there are another 26 that have expired, 4 of which are labelled “(free trial)”. I assume that the 103 is made up of the live plans plus the non-(free trial) expired plans.
The issue is, and I understand this is a very minor issue, that having the expired subscriptions listed is confusing to understand the total count, and we have no intention of renewing these (we can just purchase new plans if we need any more), so is it possible to remove these from the list at all? The only option we see when clicking on the expired subscriptions is to renew them.
Thanks for the clear breakdown — your understanding is correct, as per my understanding this is expected behaviour rather than anything wrong with your account.
A few points to clarify:
The expired commitments can’t be removed by you from the console. In Manage Quick → Manage pricing, you can only delete a subscription set that hasn’t started yet. Once a set has started (and therefore once it has expired), there’s no self-service delete — which is why the only action you see on them is Renew. They stay listed as historical records. See the “Delete a subscription” section of the docs, which notes you can only delete subscriptions that haven’t started yet: Editing a subscription.
Your active capacity is the 81 live, auto-renewing plans — that’s what actually counts for provisioning authors. The expired entries (and the “free trial” ones) don’t consume capacity or cost you anything; they’re just cluttering the view.
The subscription meter only reflects currently active subscriptions, so if you’re gauging headroom, use the meter rather than the total commitments figure at the top, which is including the historical/expired sets. This is confirmed in the “Viewing current subscriptions” section of the same guide: Editing a subscription.
If you’d like the expired entries actually cleared from the list, the route is to raise an AWS Support case (Account/Billing) and ask them to archive/remove the expired annual author commitment records. That’s not something available to us as admins in the console today. Here are the steps to open a case: Creating support cases and case management.
So in short: nothing is broken — the 81 auto-renewing plans are your real number, the expired ones are harmless history, and only AWS Support can tidy them out of the list if the clutter is bothering you.
Thanks for the thorough explanation. I shall go down the route of raising a request to AWS Support to remove the expired subscriptions. I do feel it’s ridiculous that there’s no option to remove them from the screen. Sure, it’s good for audit trails, but I can’t imagine too many customers would require that, and if they did, they could always just get a full breakdown from costings. I’d rather that than the current confusing system.