AWS Free Tier Limits You Need to Know

August 17, 2024 January 26, 2026 by David Kim in Web Development 1 min read

AWS billing dashboard showing free tier usage limits and alerts

AWS Free Tier includes three categories: 12-month offers (EC2 t2.micro, RDS, S3), always-free services (Lambda, DynamoDB), and short-term trials. The clock starts at account creation, not first use.

Common Billing Surprises

Running multiple instances splits your 750 free hours. Stopped instances still incur EBS storage costs. NAT Gateways have no free tier – approximately $32 monthly from day one.

Best Free Options

Lambda offers 1 million requests monthly. DynamoDB provides 25GB storage. CloudFront includes 1TB data transfer (always free). Set billing alerts at $1 to catch unexpected charges early.

David Kim

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Jason Michael is the editor of Web SME. Articles on the site are researched, fact-checked, and reviewed by the editorial team before publication. Read our editorial standards or send a correction at the editorial policy page.

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