The correct choice is Pay only for the resources you actually consume. This option best captures the primary cost benefit the regional media startup would gain by moving applications to AWS.

With a pay as you go model costs scale with actual demand and the company avoids buying excess capacity upfront. AWS bills many services by usage such as compute hours storage bytes and data transfer so expenses align with consumption and you can scale resources up or down to match traffic patterns.

Shift to a capital expenditure purchasing model is incorrect because adopting cloud typically shifts spending from capital expenditure to operating expenditure and not the other way around. Purchasing more hardware up front is not a cloud advantage.

Rely on commitment-based discounts such as Savings Plans as the default pricing model is incorrect because commitment discounts can reduce cost but they are optional optimizations and not the fundamental benefit of the cloud. Savings Plans are a tool to lower long term spend when usage is predictable.

Transfer all IT operations and responsibilities to AWS is incorrect because AWS uses a shared responsibility model and customers continue to manage many aspects such as their applications data and configurations.

Full AWS Practitioner Certification Question