AWS Free Tier Survival Guide

Stay within free limits and avoid surprise charges on AWS.

A quick reference for the services you can rely on at no cost—and the traps that catch new accounts off guard.

Always Free Services

These services include ongoing free allowances that do not expire after 12 months.

AWS Lambda
Run code without servers
Free limit: 1M requests/month
Amazon DynamoDB
NoSQL database
Free limit: 25 GB storage
Amazon CloudFront
Global CDN
Free limit: 1 TB data out/month
Amazon S3
Object storage
Free limit: Small monthly allowance
Amazon CloudWatch
Monitoring & alarms
Free limit: 10 alarms + 10 metrics
Amazon SNS
Notifications
Free limit: 1,000 emails/month

Cost Traps to Avoid

These resources often look harmless but can generate recurring charges from day one.

NAT Gateway
~$33/month even when idle
Application Load Balancer
~$16/month
Route 53 Hosted Zone
$0.50/month per zone
Idle Elastic IP
Charged when not attached
RDS (new accounts)
No longer always-free