The most comprehensive, up-to-date guide to AWS Free Tier. Covers the July 2025 changes, all services, and common billing traps.
- What Changed on July 15, 2025
- Always Free (Never Expires)
- 12-Month Free Tier (Legacy Accounts Only)
- Short-Term Trials
- Common Gotchas
- Track Your Free Tier Usage
- Quick Reference
AWS completely restructured Free Tier for new accounts. This is the biggest change since Free Tier launched.
| Free Plan | Paid Plan | Legacy (pre-July 15) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Who | New accounts choosing Free | New accounts choosing Paid | Existing accounts |
| Duration | 6 months max | Indefinite | 12 months + always-free |
| Initial credits | $100 | $100 | None |
| Bonus credits | Up to $100 more | Up to $100 more | None |
| Always Free services | Yes (30+) | Yes (30+) | Yes (30+) |
| Short-term trials | No | Yes | Yes |
| 12-month free tier | No | No | Yes |
| When credits run out | Account closes | Pay-as-you-go | N/A |
| At 6 months | Account closes | Nothing | N/A |
| After account closes | 90 days to recover data | N/A | N/A |
| Mission | Credit | Task |
|---|---|---|
| Sign up | $100 | Automatic |
| Launch EC2 | $20 | Start a virtual server |
| Create RDS | $20 | Provision a managed database |
| Build Lambda | $20 | Create a serverless function |
| Try Bedrock | $20 | Use the AI playground |
| Set Budget | $20 | Configure AWS Budgets |
- Reserved Instances
- Savings Plans
- AWS Marketplace purchases
- Hardware (Outposts, Snow devices)
These limits reset monthly and never expire. Available to all account types.
| Service | Free Limit | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Amazon Q Developer | 50 agentic requests/mo + 1K lines code transform | In IDE and CLI |
| AppSync | 250K queries + 250K real-time updates/mo | GraphQL APIs |
| Aurora DSQL | 100K Distributed Processing Units + 1 GB storage/mo | Serverless PostgreSQL |
| Budgets | 2 action-enabled budgets free | Cost management alerts |
| CloudFormation | 1,000 handler operations/mo | IaC; pay for resources created |
| CloudFront | 1 TB data out + 10M requests/mo | CDN |
| CloudTrail | 1 trail + 90-day event history | Management events only |
| CloudWatch | 10 metrics + 10 alarms + 5 GB logs + 1M API requests | Plus 3 dashboards |
| CodeBuild | 100 build min/mo (general1.small) | Plus 6K Lambda build seconds |
| CodeCatalyst | 2K build min + 60 dev env hrs + 10 GB storage/mo | Dev collaboration |
| CodePipeline | 1 active V1 pipeline + 100 V2 action min/mo | Per month |
| Cognito | 10K MAUs (direct/social) or 50 MAUs (SAML/OIDC) | User authentication |
| DataZone | 20 MB metadata + 4K API requests + 0.2 compute units/mo | Data governance |
| DynamoDB | 25 GB storage + 25 RCU/WCU | On-demand: 200M requests/mo |
| ECR Public | 50 GB storage + 500 GB transfer (anonymous) or 5 TB (authenticated)/mo | Public container repos |
| EventBridge | 14M Scheduler invocations/mo | Plus 5M Schema Discovery events |
| Glue Data Catalog | 1M objects stored + 1M requests/mo | Metadata only |
| IAM | Unlimited | Identity management |
| KMS | 20K requests/mo | Excludes asymmetric key operations |
| Lambda | 1M requests + 400K GB-sec/mo | Includes 100 GiB HTTP response streaming |
| Managed Prometheus | 40M samples ingested + 10 GB storage/mo | Plus 200B query samples |
| Pinpoint | 5K targeted endpoints + 100M events + 1M push notifications/mo | Marketing campaigns |
| Route 53 | 50 health checks for AWS endpoints | Plus free alias queries to AWS services |
| S3 Glacier | 10 GB retrieval/mo | Standard retrievals via Glacier API |
| Shield Standard | Unlimited | DDoS protection for all AWS resources |
| SimpleDB | 25 machine hrs + 1 GB storage/mo | Legacy NoSQL |
| SNS | 1M publishes/mo | Plus 100K HTTP, 1K email deliveries |
| SQS | 1M requests/mo | Standard and FIFO queues |
| Step Functions | 4,000 state transitions/mo | Standard Workflows only |
| SWF | 10K tasks + 30K workflow-days + 1K executions/mo | Workflow orchestration |
| Systems Manager | Most features free | Parameter Store, Session Manager, etc. |
| WAF Bot Control | 10M Common Bot requests/mo | Plus 1M Targeted Bot requests |
| X-Ray | 100K traces recorded + 1M traces scanned/mo | Tracing and debugging |
Only available to accounts created before July 15, 2025. Expires 12 months after signup.
| Service | Free Limit | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Amplify | 1K build min + 5 GB storage + 15 GB transfer + 500K SSR requests/mo | Frontend hosting |
| API Gateway | 1M REST + 1M HTTP + 1M messages + 750K connection min/mo | REST and WebSocket |
| Comprehend | 50K units (5M chars) per API/mo | NLP; 5 topic modeling jobs |
| Data Transfer | 100 GB/mo OUT | Aggregated across services; 15 GB for new accounts |
| EBS | 30 GB + 2M I/Os + 1 GB snapshots | SSD or Magnetic |
| EC2 | 750 hrs/mo (t2.micro or t3.micro) | Linux or Windows |
| ECR Private | 500 MB storage/mo | Private container repos |
| EFS | 5 GB standard storage | Regional file systems only |
| ElastiCache | 750 hrs/mo (cache.t3.micro) | Redis or Memcached |
| Elastic Load Balancing | 750 hrs + 15 GB data processing/mo | Classic and Application LBs |
| IoT Core | 250K messages/mo | Pub/sub messaging |
| IoT Device Management | 50 remote actions/mo | Device management |
| IoT Events | 2,500 message evaluations/mo | Event detection |
| IoT Greengrass | 3 devices | Edge computing |
| OpenSearch | 750 hrs/mo t2/t3.small.search + 10 GB EBS | Single-AZ |
| Polly | 5M chars standard + 1M neural + 500K long-form + 100K generative/mo | Text-to-speech |
| RDS | 750 hrs/mo (db.t2/t3/t4g.micro) | MySQL, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, SQL Server Express; 20 GB storage + 20 GB backup |
| Rekognition | 1K images + 60 min video/mo | Image and video analysis |
| S3 | 5 GB standard + 20K GET + 2K PUT/mo | Standard storage class only |
| SES | 3,000 messages/mo | For 12 months from first use |
| Transcribe | 60 min/mo | Speech-to-text |
| Translate | 2M chars/mo | Neural translation |
NOT available to Free Plan accounts. Duration starts when you first activate the service.
| Service | Duration | What You Get |
|---|---|---|
| App Studio | 60 days | 250 user hours (Available on both plans) |
| CloudTrail Lake | 30 days | 5 GB data ingestion + 5 GB scanning |
| Detective | 30 days | Security investigation and analysis |
| DocumentDB | 30 days | 750 hrs db.t3.medium + 5 GB storage + 30M I/Os |
| Forecast | 2 months | 100K data points + 10 GB storage + 10 training hrs/mo (not accepting new customers) |
| GuardDuty | 30 days | Full threat detection (CloudTrail, VPC Flow, DNS) |
| Inspector | 15 days | Unlimited vulnerability scanning (EC2, Lambda, ECR, repos) |
| IoT Device Defender | 30 days | 1 fleet audit + 1M metric datapoints (Available on both plans) |
| Kendra | 30 days | 750 hrs intelligent search (GenAI Enterprise) |
| Keyspaces | 3 months | 30M write + 30M read units + 1 GB storage/mo |
| Lightsail | 3 months | 750 hrs/mo on select bundles ($5-22 plans) |
| Macie | 30 days | Automated data discovery + 150 GB inspection |
| Managed Grafana | 90 days | Up to 5 users per account |
| MemoryDB | 2 months | 750 hrs t4g.small + 10 TB writes (Valkey) or 20 GB (Redis)/mo |
| Neptune | 30 days | 750 hrs db.t3/t4g.medium + 1 GB storage + 10M I/Os |
| Personalize | 2 months | 20 GB data + 100 training hrs (or 5M interactions) + 180K recommendations/mo |
| QuickSight | 30 days | 10 GB SPICE capacity for 4 users |
| Redshift | 2 months | 750 DC2.Large node hrs/mo |
| Redshift Serverless | 90 days | $300 credit toward compute and storage |
| SageMaker | 2 months | 250 hrs/mo ml.t3.medium notebooks |
| Storage Gateway | Until used | First 100 GB free |
| Textract | 3 months | 1K Detect pages + 100 Analyze pages/mo |
| Translate (Custom) | 2 months | 500K chars/mo Active Custom Translation |
| Wickr | 3 months | Up to 30 users, unlimited controls (Available on both plans) |
1. Hidden Charges Within Free Tier
| Trap | Cost | Why It Happens |
|---|---|---|
| Elastic IP (unattached) | $0.005/hr (~$3.60/mo) | Charged when NOT attached to running instance |
| NAT Gateway | $0.045/hr (~$32/mo) | No free tier, always charged |
| EBS Snapshots | $0.05/GB-mo | Beyond 1 GB not covered |
| Cross-region transfer | $0.02/GB | Never covered by free tier |
| IPv4 addresses | $0.005/hr | Public IPv4 charged (as of Feb 2024) |
| Secrets Manager | $0.40/secret/mo | No always-free tier; only credits |
- 750 hours = 31.25 days for ONE instance 24/7
- 2 instances = exhausted in ~15 days
- 3 instances = exhausted in ~10 days
S3 example:
- Storage: 5 GB free
- GET requests: 20,000 free
- PUT requests: 2,000 free
- Can exhaust requests while storage is under limit
Your Free Plan account automatically closes when:
- 6 months pass (even with credits remaining)
- Credits run out
After closure:
- 90-day grace period to upgrade
- Then all data permanently deleted
These popular services have no free tier at all:
- AWS Fargate
- Amazon EKS
- AWS Secrets Manager (credits only)
- Amazon Athena
- AWS Glue ETL jobs
- Amazon Kinesis
| Method | Pros | Cons |
|---|---|---|
| AWS Console | Official, accurate | Delayed updates, manual checking |
| CloudWatch Alarms | Automated alerts | Total cost only, not per-service |
| AWS Budgets | Granular, 2 free budgets | Setup complexity |
| CostGoat | Real-time, per-service and total cost alerts | Requires install |
| Created Account... | Your Plan |
|---|---|
| Before July 15, 2025 | Legacy (12-month free tier) |
| After July 15, 2025 + chose Free | Free Plan (6 months, auto-closes) |
| After July 15, 2025 + chose Paid | Paid Plan (indefinite) |
| Benefit | Legacy | Free Plan | Paid Plan |
|---|---|---|---|
| Always Free (30+ services) | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| $200 credits | No | Yes | Yes |
| 12-month free tier | Yes | No | No |
| Short-term trials | Yes | No | Yes |
| Account auto-closes | No | Yes (6 mo) | No |
All data verified from official AWS pricing pages (December 2025):
- AWS Free Tier
- AWS Free Tier FAQs
- Individual service pricing pages
Found outdated info? Open an issue with:
- Service name
- Current vs expected limit
- Source (AWS docs URL)