AWS offers a Free Tier that allows new and existing customers to explore and use AWS services for free, within specific limits. The Free Tier is divided into three categories:
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- Always Free – Available indefinitely within limits.
- 12-Month Free Trial – Available for new AWS accounts for the first 12 months.
- Short-Term Trials – Free usage for a limited period after activation.
Key AWS Free Tier Services & Limits
1. Compute Services
- Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud)
- 750 hours/month of t2.micro or t3.micro instances (for 12 months).
- Includes Linux, Windows, and RHEL/SLES AMIs.
- AWS Lambda
- 1 million free requests per month.
- 400,000 GB-seconds of compute time.
- Amazon Lightsail
- Free for 1 month (includes 750 hours of VPS usage).
2. Storage & Content Delivery
- Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)
- 5 GB of standard storage.
- 20,000 GET and 2,000 PUT requests.
- Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Store)
- 30 GB of storage (SSD or Magnetic).
- Amazon CloudFront (CDN)
- 1 TB of data transfer per month.
- AWS Backup
- 5 GB free backup storage per month.
3. Databases
- Amazon RDS (Relational Database Service)
- 750 hours/month for db.t3.micro instance.
- Includes MySQL, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, and SQL Server Express.
- Amazon DynamoDB
- 25 GB storage.
- 25 Read & Write Capacity Units.
- Amazon Redshift
- 750 hours/month for dc2.large instance (for 2 months).
- 1 TB of free storage.
- Amazon ElastiCache
- Free 750 hours of cache.t2.micro instance usage (for 12 months).
4. Analytics & Machine Learning
- Amazon Athena
- Up to 10 GB of queries per month.
- AWS Glue
- 1 million requests per month.
- 1 Data Processing Unit (DPU) for 20 minutes.
- Amazon SageMaker
- 250 hours of notebook usage.
- 50 hours of model training and 125 hours of inference.
5. Networking & Security
- Amazon VPC (Virtual Private Cloud)
- Free VPC with 1 NAT Gateway for 12 months.
- AWS Identity & Access Management (IAM)
- Free secure access and user management.
- AWS Key Management Service (KMS)
- 20,000 requests per month for free.
6. Developer & Monitoring Tools
- Amazon CloudWatch
- 1 million API requests.
- 5 GB of logs and 3 dashboards.
- AWS CodePipeline
- Free 1 active pipeline per month.
- AWS CodeBuild
- 100 free build minutes per month.
How to Stay Within Free Tier Limits?
- Use the AWS Free Tier Usage Alerts to track usage.
- Set up Billing Alerts to avoid unexpected charges.
- Use AWS Pricing Calculator to estimate costs beyond the Free Tier.
Final Thoughts
AWS Free Tier is an excellent way to explore cloud services without upfront costs. Whether you are testing applications, learning cloud computing, or running small workloads, AWS provides generous free resources.