What is the AWS free tier really - three kinds, one page

The AWS Free Tier is not one thing. As of today it's two permanent things — Always Free services with a monthly allowance that never expires, and short-term trials that start counting the second you touch them — plus a pile of up to $200 in expiring credit that new signups get instead of the old "12 months free" everybody still talks about. Here's the part almost nobody updates their blog post to say: if you opened your AWS account before July 15, 2025, you're still living in the old three-part world. If you opened it after that date, that old world doesn't apply to you at all — you're on a $100-to-$200 credit clock that runs out in six months, whether you touch a single service or not.

What "AWS Free Tier" means today, in one sentence

Jake runs a phone shop, and last month he asked me a question that made me realize how badly this topic has aged online. He'd watched a YouTube tutorial from a couple of years back that told him he'd get "12 months of free EC2" the moment he signed up. He created his account, went looking for the countdown clock, and couldn't find one. Instead he found a $100 credit balance and a note that his account would close in six months if he didn't upgrade.

He wasn't wrong to be confused. He was just watching an old video about an old program.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) — the cloud computing arm of Amazon that rents out servers, storage, and databases by the hour or by the request instead of you buying your own hardware — restructured its entire Free Tier program on July 15, 2025. Before that date, every new account got the same deal: a bundle of Always Free services that never expire, a bundle of 12 Months Free services that expire exactly one year after you create the account, and a scattering of short-term trials tied to individual services like Amazon Redshift or Amazon GuardDuty. Three categories, one page, and that's genuinely still how a lot of long-running content — and a lot of certification study guides — describe it, because it's still true for anyone who opened an account before that cutoff.

After July 15, 2025, new customers stopped getting the 12-month bundle entirely. Instead, every new account — student, hobbyist, or Fortune 500 subsidiary — gets $100 in AWS credits the moment the account is created, with the option to earn up to $100 more (for a maximum of $200) by completing a handful of guided activities in specific services. You choose a Free account plan or a Paid account plan at signup, and either way you keep access to the same 30-plus Always Free services that legacy accounts get. The credits are what replaced the 12-month bundle — not a top-up to it, a replacement for it.

This matters more than it sounds like it should, because most of what's written about "the AWS Free Tier" treats it as one static offer. It hasn't been static in a long time, and the gap between what a five-year-old blog post says and what your actual signup screen shows is exactly where people get surprised — either by a bill they didn't expect, or by an account that quietly stopped working after six months.

The old three-part Free Tier — still live for legacy accounts

If your AWS account predates July 15, 2025, this is still your world, and it's worth understanding properly because a lot of Reddit threads, YouTube comments, and certification flashcards describe exactly this and nothing else.

Always Free

These offers "do not automatically expire at the end of your 12 month AWS Free Tier term, but are available to both existing and new AWS customers indefinitely," in AWS's own wording. You get an ongoing monthly allowance for services like AWS Lambda and Amazon DynamoDB — use it or lose it each month, but it comes back every month, forever, for as long as you have a valid account.

12 Months Free

These offers "are only available to new AWS customers, and are available for 12 months following your AWS sign-up date." The clock starts the day you create the account — not the day you first launch a server. If you sign up in January and don't touch EC2 until August, you've already burned seven of your twelve months.

Short-term trials

These are tied to the individual service, not the account. The trial period "may start when you first use the service, not when you create your account." Amazon Redshift Serverless gives you a 90-day trial. Amazon Macie and Amazon Detective each give 30 days. Both models still have these — this category survived the July 2025 change intact.

The new model: Free Plan, Paid Plan, and credits that expire

Here's how AWS itself describes it: when you sign up for a new AWS account today, you choose between a Free account plan or a Paid account plan. Regardless of which one you pick, you receive $100 USD in credits after account creation, and you can earn up to an additional $100 USD by completing specific guided activities — currently listed as launching and terminating an Amazon EC2 instance, configuring a basic Amazon RDS database, building a simple web app with an AWS Lambda function behind a function URL, submitting a prompt in Amazon Bedrock (Amazon's managed generative-AI platform — think of it as a menu of AI models you can call through AWS instead of running your own), and setting a spending alert in AWS Budgets. Five activities, $20 in credit apiece, capping at $100 extra on top of the $100 you already have.

The Free account plan is built for exploring and building proof-of-concepts. AWS's own documentation says it plainly: the Free plan "ends after six months or when your credits are fully used — whichever occurs first." Six months is a hard ceiling, even if you've spent none of your $200. Free-plan accounts also can't touch certain services that would burn through the entire credit balance fast, or make hardware purchases — AWS doesn't hand a brand-new, unverified account the keys to expensive things.

The Paid account plan is what production applications live on. You still get the same $100–$200 in credits and the same Always Free services, but you also get immediate access to the full catalog — AWS says over 150 services — and once your credits run dry, you're billed standard pay-as-you-go rates for anything beyond what Always Free covers.

"People assume 'Free plan' means 'the safe one' and 'Paid plan' means 'the one that costs money,'" Ethan told Jake when he asked which box to tick during signup. "That's backwards more often than you'd think. The Free plan is the one with a countdown timer on the whole account. The Paid plan doesn't expire — it just means AWS trusts your card enough to let usage run past the free amount. Neither one is inherently cheaper. They're answering different questions."

Which rulebook applies to your account

You don't have to guess. Two minutes tells you exactly which of the two systems you're reading about, so you stop cross-referencing an article that doesn't match your account.

1. Check your account creation date. Sign in to the AWS Management Console (the web dashboard you use to launch and manage every AWS service), open the account menu in the top-right corner, and select Account. Your account creation date is listed there. Before July 15, 2025 means legacy three-part Free Tier. On or after that date means Free Plan/Paid Plan with credits.
2. Open the Billing and Cost Management console and go to the Free Tier page. Legacy accounts will show usage against the classic categories — Always Free, 12 Months Free, short-term trials — broken out by service. New-model accounts will show a credit balance and an expiration date for that balance instead of a 12-month countdown.
3. If you see a "Credits" page with a dollar figure and an expiration date rather than a percentage-of-limit-used meter for EC2 and RDS, you're on the new model. If you see monthly usage meters for EC2 hours and S3 storage that reset every month for the next several months, you're on the legacy model.

There's one more wrinkle worth knowing before it bites you: joining an AWS Organization (a feature that groups multiple AWS accounts under one management account, usually for a company with several teams or environments) or setting up an AWS Control Tower landing zone (a preconfigured multi-account setup Control Tower builds for you) makes your Free Tier credits expire immediately, and your account gets automatically upgraded from Free plan to Paid plan on the spot. If a linked account joins an Organization whose management account has already used up its Free Tier, the linked account's Free Tier is voided too. This applies whether you're on legacy or new rules — it's one of the few things both systems agree on.

Always Free: the one part that never turns off

Always Free is the constant across every account, old or new, Free plan or Paid plan. Over 30 services carry an Always Free allowance, and it resets every calendar month — unused allowance from March doesn't roll over into April, and it never accumulates.

AWS Lambda — the "serverless" compute service that runs your code in response to an event without you managing a server — gives every account 1 million free requests per month and up to 400,000 GB-seconds (or, described another way, up to 3.2 million seconds) of compute time per month, forever. A GB-second is just a way of billing that combines how much memory your function used with how long it ran — 1 GB of memory running for 1 second is 1 GB-second, and 0.5 GB running for 2 seconds is also 1 GB-second. That 400,000 GB-second allowance covers over 110 hours of runtime a month if your functions are configured with 1 GB of memory each, or a lot less if you configure them with more.

Notice what's missing from that table: EC2 and S3. On the legacy model those two live in the 12 Months Free bucket, not Always Free — which is exactly why "just use the free tier for your website" trips people up. Once a legacy account passes its first birthday, the EC2 instance and the S3 bucket it's serving files from both start billing at standard rates unless something else is covering the cost, and on a new-model account, EC2 and S3 usage is only free because your $100–$200 credit balance is quietly paying for it.

12 Months Free — legacy accounts only, and the clock never pauses

If you're reading this section, you should already know from the checklist above that your account predates July 15, 2025. This is the bucket that carries the services most beginner tutorials revolve around.

Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud — AWS's rentable virtual server product) gives 750 hours per month of a t2.micro or t3.micro instance, on Linux, RHEL, or SLES, and separately, another 750 hours per month of a Windows instance of the same size — the Linux and Windows allowances are tracked independently, so running one of each simultaneously for a full month uses up both without touching the other. 750 hours is, not coincidentally, roughly the number of hours in a 31-day month, so one instance running around the clock stays inside the limit; two instances running simultaneously burns through it in half the month. On top of the instance hours, you also get 750 hours per month of a public IPv4 address attached to an EC2 instance, tracked separately from instance size.

Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service — object storage for files, backups, and static website hosting) gives 5 GB of Standard storage, 20,000 GET requests, and 2,000 PUT requests per month. That 5 GB explicitly does not include S3's Reduced Redundancy Storage tier — only Standard storage, which is also the tier with the highest durability, so you're not being shortchanged by the exclusion.

Amazon RDS (Relational Database Service — a managed version of MySQL, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, Oracle, or SQL Server that AWS patches and backs up for you) gives 750 hours per month of a db.t2.micro or db.t3.micro instance, running Single-AZ (a single copy of the database, as opposed to a redundant standby copy in a second data center), plus 20 GB of database storage and 20 GB of backup storage.

Region matters here in a way most guides skip. Some regions — AWS names the Middle East (Bahrain) region and the EU (Stockholm) region as examples — don't offer t2.micro instances at all. In those regions, the same 750-hour allowance applies to t3.micro instead, so the free tier isn't lost, it just attaches to a different instance size depending on where you're launching.

Short-term trials: the clock you start yourself

Short-term trials are the one category identical on both the legacy and the new model, which makes them the easiest thing on this page to explain and the easiest thing to accidentally waste. Every trial "begins when you activate the service" — not when you created your account, and not when you signed up for AWS at all. Launch Amazon Redshift Serverless on a Tuesday for the first time, and that's the day your trial clock starts, whether your account is three years old or three days old.

The practical trap: because the trial timer runs on wall-clock days, not on usage, spinning a service up to "just take a quick look," then getting distracted for six weeks, and coming back to actually build with it means you've already used up two-thirds of a 90-day trial doing nothing. Trials don't pause. If you know you want to seriously evaluate a trial service, block out the time to actually use it before you flip the switch, not after.

What the Free Tier does not cover, on either model

This is where the bills that surprise people actually come from, and it's true whether you're on legacy rules or credits. If your EC2 instance is a t2.small instead of a t2.micro, that's not covered — the free hours only apply to the exact instance sizes named, and "close enough" doesn't count. If you're running Amazon Aurora instead of a plain RDS engine, that's not covered either; Aurora sits outside the RDS free allowance entirely.

A NAT Gateway — a component that lets private servers reach the internet for updates without being directly reachable from it — is never part of any free tier and bills by the hour plus by the amount of data it processes, around the clock, whether anything is using it or not. An Elastic IP address (a fixed public IP you can reserve) is free only while it's actively attached to a running instance; leave it reserved but unattached, even for an hour, and it starts billing. Data transfer out to the internet beyond the small included allowance on each service is billed per gigabyte, and it's one of the easiest costs to lose track of because it's rarely front and center in a "what am I using" review.

Locking down your account before someone else spends your free tier for you

There's a version of "surprise bill" that has nothing to do with misreading a service limit: someone else spending your free tier, or your credits, without you knowing. It happens most often through a leaked access key — the long string of letters and numbers AWS uses to let code or command-line tools log in without a password. Paste one into a public code repository by accident, and it stops being private the moment it's pushed, whether or not anyone tells you so.

AWS's own Identity and Access Management (IAM) guidance is blunt about the fix: don't create access keys for the root user at all. The root user is the single account created when you first sign up, with unrestricted power over everything in the account — AWS's own security documentation describes it as something to safeguard and use only for the handful of tasks that specifically require it, not for everyday logins. For everyday work, AWS's documented recommendation is to create one or more IAM users instead, each with only the permissions that specific task needs, and to use temporary credentials through IAM roles rather than long-lived access keys wherever you can.

Jake asked the obvious follow-up: why would anyone bother targeting a free-tier account that, by definition, doesn't have much money sitting in it? Ethan's answer: "Nobody's targeting your account specifically. Automated scanners crawl public code repositories all day looking for anything that looks like an AWS key, and they don't check your account balance before they use it. They just want compute — usually to mine cryptocurrency — and they don't care whose bill it lands on. A brand-new account with a fresh $100–$200 credit balance is, if anything, a more attractive target than an old one that's already been picked clean, because there's more free runway to burn through before you notice." Never commit access keys, `.env` files, or credentials of any kind into a code repository, public or private — a private repository can still be misconfigured or briefly exposed, and the safest key is the one that was never typed into a file in the first place.

If you do use access keys for anything — say, a script that uploads files to S3 from your own laptop — AWS's IAM documentation points to two further habits worth building early. First, use AWS CloudTrail (a service that logs every API call made in your account) to monitor access-key usage, so a key being used from an unfamiliar location or at an unusual hour leaves a record you can actually go check. Second, review and delete access keys you're no longer using rather than letting old ones sit around indefinitely — a key that hasn't been touched in eight months but still technically works is exactly the kind of thing that gets forgotten until it's the reason for a bill. Neither habit costs anything on a free-tier account, and both are the sort of thing that's far easier to set up before you have twelve services running than to retrofit afterward.

Popular advice that's just wrong now

"You get 12 months of free EC2 when you sign up" is the single most repeated piece of AWS advice on the internet, and for any account opened on or after July 15, 2025, it's flatly untrue. There is no 12-month EC2 allowance on the new model. EC2 usage on a new-model account is only free because it's being paid for out of your $100–$200 credit balance, which is a completely different mechanism — a shrinking pool of dollars, not a renewing monthly hour allowance. Burn through EC2 usage fast enough on the new model, and you can exhaust your entire free-tier lifeline in a single busy weekend instead of coasting on it for a year.

The second piece of outdated advice: "the Free Tier account never expires unless you upgrade it." That's true for the legacy model — a legacy account with an expired 12-Months-Free period just quietly switches to pay-as-you-go for the services that were in that bucket, and the account itself keeps existing indefinitely. On the new Free plan, the account itself has an expiration date. Six months, full stop, whether you've spent $2 or $199 of your credit. If you don't upgrade to Paid within 90 days after that Free Plan Period ends, AWS closes the account permanently and deletes its content.

How to actually avoid a surprise bill

AWS gives you three separate ways to watch your usage, and none of them require third-party tools. The Free Tier page inside the Billing and Cost Management console shows current-month activity broken down by service, usage type, and region. There's also a programmatic option — the GetFreeTierUsage API — for anyone comfortable with the command line who wants to script a check. And by default, you get automatic email alerts to your account's root email as you approach Free Tier limits, which you can reconfigure to a different address or turn off in the console's alert preferences.

1. Set a $0 budget the same day you create the account. In AWS Budgets, create a cost budget with a $0.01 threshold and an email alert. This fires the moment any charge — even a single cent — hits your account, which is the earliest possible warning you can get.
2. Check the Free Tier page in Billing and Cost Management weekly, not monthly. Estimated bills typically regenerate roughly every eight hours, so the numbers you see are close to real time, not a stale monthly snapshot.
3. Confirm your instance sizes match the free-tier names exactly — t2.micro or t3.micro for EC2, db.t2.micro or db.t3.micro for RDS — since a slightly larger size isn't partially covered, it's simply not covered.
4. Shut down or terminate anything you're not actively using the moment you're done with it, rather than leaving it running "just in case." A stopped EC2 instance still incurs storage charges for its attached disk even while the compute itself isn't billing.

One console quirk worth flagging: if you're the member of an Organization rather than the management (payer) account, you won't see any Free Tier usage data in your own console at all — only the management account can see it, aggregated across every linked account. If your usage screen looks blank and you're not the one who set up billing, that's almost certainly why.

Letting AWS watch your spend for you

A $0.01 budget catches a charge after it's already happened. AWS Cost Anomaly Detection, a free feature inside the Billing and Cost Management console, tries to catch it earlier by learning what your normal spending pattern looks like and flagging anything that deviates from it — a sudden spike, or a gradual creep that a fixed threshold would miss entirely. It runs roughly three times a day against your billing data, and because that data itself can lag by up to 24 hours, an anomaly won't necessarily surface the instant it happens — but for a free-tier account where "normal" usually means close to $0, even a same-day alert catches most runaway costs long before a monthly bill would.

Setting it up takes about the same effort as a budget: open Cost Anomaly Detection in the console, create a monitor — AWS lets you segment by service, so you're not lumping a Lambda cost spike in with an S3 one — and attach an email or Amazon SNS notification to it. For a single personal account, one AWS-service monitor covering everything is usually enough; the finer-grained options (per-linked-account, per-tag) earn their keep once you're managing several accounts, not one hobby project.

That's also the honest answer on third-party cost-monitoring tools, which a lot of "how to save on AWS" content pushes hard: for a single free-tier account running a handful of Always Free services, they're solving a problem you don't have yet. AWS's own Budgets, Cost Explorer, and Cost Anomaly Detection are free, built in, and cover exactly this use case. Third-party platforms genuinely add value once you're reconciling spend across multiple linked accounts, multiple clouds, or a production budget with real optimization work to do — not while you're deciding whether a single Lambda function needs 128 MB or 256 MB of memory.

What to do if you've already been billed

Everything above is prevention. If a charge has already landed, the first move is to stop it from repeating — terminate or stop whatever resource caused it, since a bill that's already been generated for last month won't undo itself, but next month's charge is still avoidable. From there, AWS's documented path is to open a support case under "Account and billing" in the AWS Support Center, which AWS states can be done free of charge regardless of your support plan. AWS also publishes a specific checklist for identifying unwanted charges, which walks through the most common causes before you even open a case.

Edge cases people actually run into

Regions. Free Tier usage is calculated across all AWS regions and added together, not tracked separately per region — 750 hours of EC2 means 750 hours total across every region you use, not 750 hours in each one. The legacy Free Tier is not available in AWS GovCloud (US) regions, with one specific exception: Lambda's Always Free allowance does apply there. It is available in AWS's China regions.

Consolidated Billing and Organizations. Only the payer (management) account's Free Tier status applies across an entire Organization. If the payer's Free Tier has already expired, any account that joins that Organization has its own Free Tier voided the moment it joins — even if that account, on its own, would still have been eligible.

New account, same person. AWS is explicit that you're ineligible for the Free plan or Free Tier credits if you have an existing AWS account, or have had one in the past. Opening a fresh email address specifically to farm a second round of credits isn't something the program is designed to allow, and it's the kind of thing that gets flagged during account verification.

Ethan's take on the whole restructuring, when Jake finally asked him to just settle the argument: "It's the more honest of the two models, even though it feels stingier at first. The old 12-months-free bundle quietly rewarded people who happened to start using AWS heavily right away and quietly punished people who signed up early and got busy with life for six months. A dollar-credit balance doesn't care when you use it within its window — it just tells you exactly how much runway you've got left, in a currency everyone already understands. I'd rather see a number go down than guess how many of my 750 hours I've burned this month."

Frequently asked questions

Is the AWS Free Tier actually free, or do I need a credit card?

You need a valid payment method on file to create any AWS account, free or otherwise — AWS uses it for identity verification even if you never get charged. As long as you stay within your Always Free limits, your 12-month allowance (legacy accounts), or your credit balance (new accounts), that card is never charged.

Do I still get 12 months free if I sign up today?

No. The 12-Months-Free category was retired for new signups on July 15, 2025. Accounts created on or after that date get a Free Plan or Paid Plan with $100–$200 in expiring credit instead, plus the same Always Free services legacy accounts get.

What happens when my Free Plan expires after six months?

Your account stops being usable. You have 90 days after the expiration notice to upgrade to the Paid Plan and keep your content and resources; after 90 days, AWS permanently closes the account and deletes everything in it.

How much is the AWS Free Tier credit actually worth?

$100 automatically at signup, with up to $100 more available by completing five specific guided activities across services like EC2, RDS, Lambda, Bedrock, and Budgets — a maximum of $200 total. The credits expire 12 months from account creation regardless of your plan type.

Does the Always Free tier ever run out?

Not as a lifetime total. Each Always Free allowance resets every calendar month and applies for as long as you have a valid AWS account. It never expires the way the 12-month bundle or a credit balance does; it just doesn't roll over unused capacity between months.

Will I be charged automatically when a short-term trial ends?

If you keep using the service after the trial window closes, yes — usage after that point bills at standard rates, or draws down your credits if you're on the new model and still have a balance. Nothing forces the service to stop running just because the trial ended.

What is the actual difference between the Free plan and the Paid plan?

Both start with the same $100–$200 credit and the same Always Free services. The Free plan expires after six months or when credits run out, blocks certain services and hardware purchases, and permanently closes if you don't upgrade in time. The Paid plan has no expiration date, unlocks over 150 services, and simply switches to pay-as-you-go billing once your credits are used.

Can I switch from the Paid plan back to the Free plan?

AWS's published account plan process describes moving from Free to Paid, not the reverse. Treat the choice at signup as effectively one-directional and pick based on whether you expect to need the account past six months.

Does AWS Free Tier cover EC2 forever?

Only in the sense that Lambda, DynamoDB, and the other Always Free services do — and EC2 isn't one of them. On legacy accounts, EC2's 750 free hours a month stop after 12 months from account creation. On new accounts, EC2 usage is only free while your credit balance lasts.

What is not covered by AWS Free Tier that catches people out?

NAT Gateways, unattached Elastic IP addresses, instance sizes larger than t2.micro/t3.micro, database engines outside the named RDS engines (Aurora included), and data transfer out beyond each service's small included allowance are the most common sources of unexpected charges.

Do Free Tier credits roll over if I don't use them?

No, on both systems. Legacy monthly allowances (like EC2's 750 hours) reset on the first day of each month and don't accumulate. New-model credits are a shrinking dollar balance with a 12-month expiration date, not a monthly allowance — there's nothing to roll over, only a balance to spend down before it expires.

What happens to my Free Tier if my account joins an AWS Organization?

New-model credits expire immediately and the account is auto-upgraded to Paid the moment it joins an Organization or sets up an AWS Control Tower landing zone. On legacy accounts, only the Organization's payer account's Free Tier status applies; a linked account's own Free Tier is voided if the payer's has already expired.

Can I get the AWS Free Tier twice by signing up with a new email address?

Eligibility for the Free plan and Free Tier credits is tied to whether you or your organization have had an AWS account before, not to the email address on a new signup form. A second account under a new email from someone who's already had AWS access isn't considered a new customer.

Is AWS Free Tier available in every AWS region?

Almost everywhere, but not the AWS GovCloud (US) regions — with Lambda's Always Free allowance as the sole documented exception there. It is available in AWS's China regions. Usage is totaled across all the regions you use rather than reset per region.

How do I check how much of my Free Tier I've used?

Open the Billing and Cost Management console and go to the Free Tier page for a breakdown by service, usage type, and region, refreshed roughly every eight hours. You can also query usage programmatically through the GetFreeTierUsage API, or rely on the automatic usage alert emails sent to your account's root email address.

Is Amazon Bedrock included in the AWS Free Tier?

Bedrock isn't listed among the Always Free or legacy 12-Months-Free services. It does appear as one of the five guided activities new accounts can complete to earn part of their extra $100 in credits, and usage beyond what those credits cover bills at Bedrock's standard rates.

Revision note. Written September 2026. AWS occasionally adjusts which guided activities unlock the extra $100 in credits, so check the Free Tier page in your own console before assuming today's five activities are still the same five. If you've been going in circles trying to match an old tutorial to a screen that doesn't look anything like it, you're not missing something obvious — the program genuinely changed underneath you, and now you know exactly where you stand.