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AWS provides generous free usage allowances to help you learn and experiment, and powerful cost management tools to help you understand and control your spending. This lesson covers the AWS Free Tier in detail and introduces Cost Explorer, AWS Budgets, and other cost management features.
The AWS Free Tier lets you use certain AWS services at no charge, within specified limits. There are three types:
Short-term free access when you first use a service:
| Service | Free Trial |
|---|---|
| Amazon SageMaker | 2 months of select usage |
| Amazon Redshift | 2-month free trial |
| Amazon GuardDuty | 30-day free trial |
| Amazon Inspector | 15-day free trial |
| Amazon Macie | 30-day free trial |
Available for 12 months after you create your AWS account:
| Service | Monthly Free Allowance |
|---|---|
| Amazon EC2 | 750 hours of t2.micro or t3.micro (Linux and Windows) |
| Amazon S3 | 5 GB standard storage |
| Amazon RDS | 750 hours of db.t2.micro or db.t3.micro |
| Amazon CloudFront | 1 TB data transfer out |
| Amazon EBS | 30 GB of General Purpose (SSD) storage |
| Amazon ElastiCache | 750 hours of cache.t2.micro or cache.t3.micro |
| Elastic Load Balancing | 750 hours of Classic or Application Load Balancer |
| Amazon API Gateway | 1 million REST API calls |
Never expire and are available to all AWS customers:
| Service | Monthly Free Allowance |
|---|---|
| AWS Lambda | 1 million requests + 400,000 GB-seconds |
| Amazon DynamoDB | 25 GB storage + 25 read/write capacity units |
| Amazon SNS | 1 million publishes |
| Amazon SQS | 1 million requests |
| Amazon CloudWatch | 10 custom metrics, 10 alarms, 1 million API requests |
| AWS CloudFormation | Unlimited (you pay for the resources it creates) |
| AWS IAM | Always free |
| AWS CloudTrail | One trail with management events free |
⚠ Common Free Tier mistakes:
1. Leaving EC2 instances running after the 750-hour monthly limit
2. Forgetting to terminate resources when done experimenting
3. Using an instance type NOT covered by the Free Tier (e.g., t3.small)
4. Exceeding S3 storage or request limits
5. Forgetting that the 12-month clock starts the day you create your account
6. Running multiple instances that collectively exceed 750 hours
(e.g., 2 instances × 400 hours = 800 hours — 50 hours charged)
You can enable Free Tier usage alerts in the Billing Preferences:
Cost Explorer is a built-in tool for visualising, understanding, and managing your AWS costs and usage over time.
Cost Explorer must be enabled the first time you use it. Go to the Billing Dashboard → Cost Explorer → Enable Cost Explorer. Data becomes available within 24 hours.
Interactive charts showing your spending over time, filterable by:
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