Hello Cloud Enthusiasts! ☁️👋

Welcome to the ultimate guide on the AWS Free Tier. If you are starting your cloud journey, you’ve probably heard the rumors: "AWS gives you free servers for a year!" or "I accidentally left a server running and now I owe Jeff Bezos $500!" 💸

Both are true. But don't worry! Today, I’m going to break down exactly how the AWS Free Tier works, explain the massive changes made in 2025, and show you how to avoid those surprise bills.

🚨 The Big Update (July 2025)

Stop scanning and read this first. If you created your account after July 15, 2025, the "12 Months Free" model has changed significantly.

Legacy Accounts (Created before July 15, 2025): You still have the traditional "12 Months Free" bucket for services like EC2 and RDS.
New Accounts: You are now on the "AWS Free Plan." Instead of specific service limits (like 750 hours of EC2), you get $100 USD in AWS Credits upon signup (plus opportunities to earn more). This plan lasts for 6 months or until your credits run out.

Note: The guide below covers the general concepts that apply to both, but keep this distinction in mind!

🧠 The 3 Types of "Free"

AWS categorizes their free offers into three buckets. Knowing the difference is how you stay wallet-safe.

1. ♾️ Always Free

These offers never expire. They are available to all AWS customers indefinitely.

AWS Lambda: 1 Million free requests per month.
Amazon DynamoDB: 25 GB of storage.
Amazon SNS: 1 Million publishes.

2. 📅 12-Months Free (Legacy) / Credit Model (New)

Old Model: For the first 12 months, you get a monthly allowance (e.g., 750 hours of EC2). If you exceed it, you pay.
New Model: You use your $100 credits to cover these costs. Once credits are gone, you pay.

3. ⏳ Short-Term Trials

These are one-time trials for specific premium services.

Example: Amazon Inspector (15-day trial) or Amazon SageMaker.

🛠️ Deep Dive: The Heavy Hitters

Here are the specific limits for the most popular services.

💻 Amazon EC2 (Virtual Servers)

The Offer: 750 Hours per month of Linux, RHEL, or SLES t2.micro or t3.micro instance.
The Catch: 750 hours is exactly enough to run ONE instance continuously for a month (24 hours x 31 days = 744 hours).
Danger Zone: If you launch two instances, you burn 2 hours of credit for every 1 hour of real-time. You will run out of free hours halfway through the month! 🛑

🗄️ Amazon S3 (File Storage)

The Offer: 5 GB of Standard Storage.
The Offer: 20,000 Get Requests & 2,000 Put Requests.
The Catch: It’s easy to hit the request limit if you use S3 to host images for a high-traffic website.

🗃️ Amazon RDS (Relational Databases)

The Offer: 750 Hours per month of db.t2.micro, db.t3.micro (or t4g.micro on new plans) Single-AZ.
The Offer: 20 GB of Database Storage (SSD).
The Catch: Making your database Multi-AZ (for high availability) doubles the cost and is not covered by the Free Tier.

⚡ AWS Lambda (Serverless)

The Offer: 1,000,000 free requests per month.
The Offer: up to 3.2 million seconds of compute time.
The Best Part: This is Always Free, not just for 12 months.

💸 "Paid Services" & Common Traps

Even with a Free Tier account, you can be charged immediately if you touch these:

IP Address: If you allocate an IP address if you AWS account is new AWS provides 1 Free IP for an year it does not charge you, but after a year when free tier , AWS charges after free tier ends (~$0.005/hour), or extra IP's allocated. Be careful do no create unnecessary IP Addresses!
NAT Gateways: These are never free. They cost roughly $0.045/hour + data processing fees.
Data Transfer: Transferring data IN to AWS is free. Transferring data OUT (to the internet) is only free for the first 100GB/month.
EBS Volumes: When you "terminate" an EC2 instance, the storage volume (hard drive) might stick around if you didn't check the "Delete on Termination" box. You will pay for that storage until you delete it manually.

🔗 Essential AWS Resources

Bookmark these official pages to track your usage and pricing.

🏆 Official Free Tier Page: https://aws.amazon.com/free
💰 Billing & Cost Management Console: https://console.aws.amazon.com/billing/
💻 EC2 Pricing: https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/
🗄️ S3 Pricing: https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/
⚡ Lambda Pricing: https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/pricing/

💡 Pro Tip: Set a Billing Alarm!

Do not launch a single resource until you do this:

Go to the Billing Console.
Select "Budgets" on the left menu.
Create a Cost Budget.
Set the amount to $0.01 (or $1.00).
Enter your email.

Now, if you accidentally spend even a penny, AWS will email you immediately! 📧

🎬 Recap in GIFs

When you first sign up for AWS Free Tier: Success Kid

When you forget to stop your EC2 instance and check the bill 30 days later: Money Flying Away

When you successfully set up your $0.01 budget alarm: Hacker

Happy Cloud Computing! ☁️

Hello Cloud Enthusiasts! ☁️👋

Both are true. But don't worry! Today, I’m going to break down exactly how the AWS Free Tier works, explain the massive changes made in 2025, and show you how to avoid those surprise bills.

🚨 The Big Update (July 2025)

Stop scanning and read this first. If you created your account after July 15, 2025, the "12 Months Free" model has changed significantly.

Legacy Accounts (Created before July 15, 2025): You still have the traditional "12 Months Free" bucket for services like EC2 and RDS.
New Accounts: You are now on the "AWS Free Plan." Instead of specific service limits (like 750 hours of EC2), you get $100 USD in AWS Credits upon signup (plus opportunities to earn more). This plan lasts for 6 months or until your credits run out.

Note: The guide below covers the general concepts that apply to both, but keep this distinction in mind!