I think amazon has a pricing error on their website for the light utilization instances since the April price drop as they are more expensive than even the on demand ones (at least the ones I looked at).

I submitted a support ticket but haven't heard anything back. Once you start looking at medium reservation the prices fall significantly.

For example for the 3.75GB m3.medium is $51.1 on demand per month vs ~56 for the light reservation vs ~35 for the medium reservation. All running 24/7 and 1 year terms on reservations.

EDIT: Just got a reply on my support ticket. I guess the light reservation instances are just for reserving capacity now.

"You are correct about the Light Utilization Reserved Instances. I have brought this to the attention of the EC2 pricing team to see if this is an error on our part. Unfortunately, these Reserved Instance types now only cover Capacity Reservation and no longer offer a discounted hourly rate over the On Demand hourly prices."

Ha, I emailed my rep about that exact same thing 12 hours ago.

Looks to me like the Current Generation instance types are consistently cheaper than the corresponding Previous Generation instances.

You're looking at the pricing table wrong.

The m3's start at medium, and the m1's start at small.

The previous generation had a small instance (m1.small). There is no comparable offering in the current generation (at least, not yet). The smallest m3 instance is the m3.medium. You can still provision an m1.small, though, right? You just miss out on the hardware upgrade.

GCE, Digital Ocean, etc may be a better fit than AWS for these kinds of instances.