A state agency's finance team is estimating the budget for a six-month GenAI pilot that will use Amazon Bedrock, priced on a consumption basis. The pilot's exact usage volume is uncertain, and the team wants a pricing structure that avoids a large upfront capacity commitment. Which statement correctly describes what consumption-based pricing means for the agency's budget planning?

Consumption-based pricing ties cost directly to measured usage, typically the volume of requests or tokens processed, so the agency's bill scales up or down with actual pilot activity rather than a number decided months in advance. That matters for early-stage planning because it lets a finance team model a range of usage scenarios instead of locking in one guess about demand before the pilot even starts. A per-seat model instead charges by the number of named users regardless of how often, or how little, each one actually queries the system, which fits ongoing software licensing more than an experimental workload with unknown reach. A flat monthly fee removes the usage link entirely, so it protects against a usage spike but also means the agency pays the same amount even in a month the pilot barely gets used, defeating the goal of avoiding upfront commitment. Reserved, always-on compute capacity shifts the risk the other direction, since the agency pays for standing readiness whether or not anyone submits a request that day. One scope caveat: consumption-based pricing can become costlier than a reserved or seat-based model once usage is high and predictable, so it typically fits a pilot phase better than a mature, steady-state deployment. A useful budget check is asking finance to model the pilot's monthly cost at both a low-usage and a high-usage scenario before presenting a number to leadership.