4.2.1. AWS Free Tier
💡 First Principle: The AWS Free Tier provides a cost-effective way for new users to explore and experiment with AWS services within certain limits, enabling hands-on learning and development without incurring charges.
The AWS Free Tier allows you to explore and try out many AWS services free of charge, up to certain usage limits. It's an excellent way for new users to learn about AWS and for developers to build and test applications without incurring costs.
Key Aspects of the AWS Free Tier (for accounts created on or after July 15, 2025):
- Two Account Plans: At sign-up you choose one.
- Free account plan: For experimenting and building proofs of concept. You are never charged on this plan. It ends after six months or when your credits are used up, whichever comes first. AWS then closes the account and keeps your data for 90 days, during which you can upgrade to the paid plan to restore access. Some services that would consume the credits very quickly aren't available on it.
- Paid account plan: For workloads that will outgrow the credits. Credits are applied first; beyond them you pay standard pay-as-you-go rates.
- Credits: New customers get USD $100 in credits at sign-up on either plan, and can earn up to $100 more by completing activities with services such as Amazon EC2, Amazon RDS, AWS Lambda, Amazon Bedrock and AWS Budgets.
- Always Free: Over 30 services keep an ongoing monthly allowance regardless of plan. E.g., 1 million AWS Lambda requests per month, 25 GB of Amazon DynamoDB storage.
- Accounts created before July 15, 2025 stay on the legacy program, which offered 12-month free allowances (such as 750 hours a month of a small EC2 instance) alongside Always Free and short-term trials. You may still see this model in older material.
- Monitoring Usage: Track your remaining credits and Free Tier usage in the Billing and Cost Management console, and set an AWS Budgets alert so you know before costs appear.
Scenario: A student is learning about AWS and wants to experiment with EC2 instances and S3 storage without incurring any costs.
Reflection Question: How does the AWS Free Tier, by combining sign-up credits, a free account plan that cannot incur charges, and Always Free allowances, fundamentally offer a cost-effective way for new users to explore and experiment with AWS services without incurring charges?
