AWS is offering a free usage tier for new AWS customers. Per month, the AWS free usage tier covers:
750 hours of Amazon EC2 Linux or RHEL or SLES t2.micro instance usage (1 GiB of memory and 32-bit and 64-bit platform support) – enough hours to run continuously each month*
750 hours of Amazon EC2 Microsoft Windows Server† t2.micro instance usage (1 GiB of memory and 32-bit and 64-bit platform support) – enough hours to run continuously each month*
750 hours of an Elastic Load Balancer plus 15 GB data processing*
750 hours of Amazon RDS Single-AZ Micro DB Instances, running MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle BYOL or SQL Server Express Edition – enough hours to run a DB Instance continuously each month. You also get 20 GB of database storage, 10 million I/Os and 20 GB of backup storage*
750 hours of Amazon ElastiCache Micro Cache Node usage – enough hours to run continuously each month. *
30 GB of Amazon Elastic Block Storage in any combination of General Purpose (SSD) or Magnetic, plus 2 million I/Os (with EBS Magnetic) and 1 GB of snapshot storage***
5 GB of Amazon S3 standard storage, 20,000 Get Requests, and 2,000 Put Requests*
25 GB of Storage, 25 Units of Read Capacity and 25 Units of Write Capacity, enough to handle up to 200M requests per month with Amazon DynamoDB.**
25 Amazon SimpleDB Machine Hours and 1 GB of Storage**
1,000 Amazon SWF workflow executions can be initiated for free. A total of 10,000 activity tasks, signals, timers and markers, and 30,000 workflow-days can also be used for free**
100,000 Requests of Amazon Simple Queue Service**
100,000 Requests, 100,000 HTTP notifications and 1,000 email notifications for Amazon Simple Notification Service**
10 Amazon Cloudwatch metrics, 10 alarms, and 1,000,000 API requests**
50 GB Data Transfer Out, 2,000,000 HTTP and HTTPS Requests for Amazon CloudFront*
15 GB of bandwidth out aggregated across all AWS services*
* These free tiers are only available to existing AWS customers who have signed-up for Free Tier after October 20, 2010 and new AWS customers, and are available for 12 months following your AWS sign-up date. When your free usage expires or if your application use exceeds the free usage tiers, you simply pay standard, pay-as-you-go service rates (see each service page for full pricing details). Restrictions apply; see offer terms for more details.
For EC2 and RDS Free Tier, t1.micro may be substituted for t2.micro.
**These free tiers are available to both existing and new AWS customers indefinitely. For EC2 and RDS Free Tier, t1.micro may be substituted for t2.micro.
***If the combined usage is still under 30GB, both will be free. If the combined usage is over 30GB, the more expensive storage will count against the free tier first.
The AWS free usage tier will expire 12 months from the date you sign up. When your free usage expires or if your application use exceeds the free usage tiers, you simply pay standard, pay-as-you-go service rates (see each service page for full pricing details). Restrictions apply; see offer terms for more details.
Amazon Simple Workflow Service, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon SimpleDB, Amazon Simple Notification Service, and Amazon Simple Queue Service free tiers are available to both existing and new AWS customers indefinitely.
The AWS free usage tier is available to all new customer accounts – students, entrepreneurs, small businesses, and Fortune 500 companies are all welcome to sign up. To start using the AWS free usage tier, create an AWS account, subscribe to the services you’d like to use, and enter a valid credit card.
No, customers that use Consolidated Billing to consolidate payment across multiple accounts will only have access to one free usage tier.
No, the AWS free usage tier is applied to your monthly usage, will expire on the 1st day of the new month, and does not accumulate.
If your usage exceeds the monthly free tiers, you simply pay standard, pay-as-you-go AWS service rates. See each service page for full pricing details:
By logging into your Account Activity page, you can see current and past usage activity by service and region, and download Usage Reports.
Yes, the AWS free usage tier applies to participating services across all AWS regions: US East (Northern Virginia), US West (Oregon), US West (Northern California), EU (Ireland), EU (Frankfurt), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Sydney), and South America (Sao Paulo). The AWS free usage tier for Amazon CloudFront is aggregated across all AWS edge locations. Your usage is calculated each month across all regions and automatically applied to your bill. For example, you will receive 750 Amazon EC2 Linux Micro Instance hours for free across all of the regions you use, not 750 hours per region.
Please see AWS free usage tier with Windows FAQ.
Please see AWS free usage tier with Amazon RDS.
Yes. A customer with access to the AWS Free Usage Tier can use up to 750 instance hours each of t2.micro instances running Linux and Windows. Usage of the Linux and Windows t2.micro instances are counted independently.
AWS’s free usage tier is not limited to specific use cases. This offering provides new AWS customers with free usage tiers for certain AWS services to help you get started. If you have a new idea that you’d like to launch or if you have an existing application you want to run in the cloud, this is a great way to get started for free. Some ideas include, but are not limited to, hosting low traffic websites or blogs, social media applications, development and test projects, proof of concepts, and more. See how other customers are using AWS today in our case study section.
AWS’s free usage tier is available to new AWS accounts created on or after October 21, 2010. The free tier applies to certain participating AWS services up to a specific maximum amount of usage each month—applicable services and usage amounts are defined above and at aws.amazon.com/free. When an account goes over a free tier of usage, the standard AWS service rates will be billed to your credit card.
If you have not exceeded the usage tiers, you may have been charged for related services that are not covered under the free tier. Some examples include: if you are running an Amazon EC2 t2.small instance rather than a t2.micro instance, or if you are using a service not included in the offer, such as Amazon ElastiCache. To review your AWS usage activity, log into your Account Activity page and download Usage Report at aws.amazon.com/account-activity.
If you have not exceeded the usage tiers, you may have been charged for related services that are not covered under the free tier. Some examples include: if you are running an Amazon EC2 m1.small instance rather than a t1.micro instance, if you are using a SUSE Linux instance rather than an Amazon EC2 Linux instance, or if you are using a service not included in the offer, such as Amazon ElastiCache. To review your AWS usage activity, log into your Account Activity page and download Usage Reports at aws.amazon.com/account-activity.
No, the AWS free tier does not include Amazon S3 RRS storage. The AWS free tier includes 5 GB of Amazon S3 standard storage, which offers the highest Amazon S3 durability.
