Do I need to pay for reserved instances for an app with steady traffic?

Not necessarily — reserved instances are worth considering for steady traffic, but only if the workload is likely to run continuously for a long enough period and the service is one where reservations actually apply.

Rule of thumb

• Yes, consider them if your app uses the same compute resources 24/7 and you expect that to continue for at least 1 year.
• No, skip them if traffic is steady but:
  • you may need to scale up/down often,
  • the app might be retired or moved,
  • you’re not sure about usage for the next year,
  • or the pricing model for your cloud service doesn’t benefit much from reservations.

In practice

For steady traffic, you usually compare:

• On-demand pricing: more flexible, higher cost
• Reserved / committed pricing: lower cost, less flexible
• Savings plans / committed use discounts: often better than classic reserved instances, depending on the cloud

Important distinction

If you’re on:

• AWS: “Reserved Instances” can help for EC2/RDS, but Savings Plans are often simpler and more flexible for compute.
• Azure: look at Reserved VM Instances / reservations.
• GCP: look at Committed Use Discounts.

Practical recommendation

If your app has truly steady baseline usage:

1. Estimate the minimum always-on capacity
2. Leave burst/spike capacity on-demand
3. Commit only for the baseline amount

That way you keep flexibility and still reduce cost.

If you want, I can help you decide based on your cloud provider and current instance type/usage pattern.