Provider guide

AWS free tier

AWS has 25 services with a free tier -16 always-free, 8 time-limited, and 1 credit-based. Average FTV score across the set: 42/100. Last verified Aug 18, 2026.

What you actually get free on AWS

AWS free tier coverage spans compute, storage, databases, and developer tooling, but the shape of the offer changed for new accounts created after July 15, 2025 - see the gotchas below before you sign up. Across AWS's 25 services, 16 give you a permanent monthly allowance, 8 are time-limited introductory or trial offers, 1 hands out a one-time signup credit, and 25 of 25 publish a pricing page, linked in the table below.

Always free vs free trial vs free credit

AWS's free offers come in three shapes. Each badge links to the full definition of that type.

Always free

16
Free tier

Products that ship with a permanent free tier - typically a usage cap that resets each month, with paid plans available when you need to scale beyond it.

Free trial

8
Intro tier

Free tiers with an introductory phase that hands new accounts a larger allowance for the first few months, then steps down to a smaller permanent free tier.

Free credit

1
Free credit

A one-off credit applied at signup. You spend it on usage at normal rates; once it runs out the account becomes pay-as-you-go.

AWS free tier limits, service by service

AWS free tier quotas by service, last verified Aug 18, 2026.
ServiceTypeWhat's freeFTVEst. value
AWS Security AgentIntro tier
  • Up to 400 pentesting task-hours per trial month for new AWS Security Agent customers.
  • 2-month free trial starting with the first penetration test run.
  • Full reporting and detailed findings included in the free trial.
  • Actionable code fixes included in the free trial.
72$1,000 / month
Amazon CognitoFree tier
  • Up to 10,000 monthly active users per month for direct sign-ins or social identity providers on Lite or Essentials tiers.
  • Up to 50 monthly active users per month for SAML 2.0 or OIDC federated sign-ins, regardless of tier.
  • Free identity pool authentication and unique identifier generation at no charge.
  • Indefinite free tier availability for existing and new AWS customers, with no 12-month expiration.
  • No free tier for Plus tier direct sign-ins.
  • No free tier for machine-to-machine token requests.
  • Not available in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions.
69$150 / month
Amazon CloudWatchFree tier
  • Logs: 5 GB of data per month for ingestion, archive storage, and Logs Insights data scanned.
  • Live Tail: 1,800 minutes of usage per month.
  • Contributor Insights for CloudWatch Logs: 1 rule per month, plus the first 1 million matching log events.
  • Metrics: Basic monitoring metrics from AWS services by default, plus 10 custom or detailed monitoring metrics.
  • Metrics API usage: 1 million API requests per month, excluding GetMetricData, GetInsightRuleReport, and GetMetricWidgetImage.
  • Dashboards: 3 custom dashboards with up to 50 metrics each per month; automatic dashboards are free.
  • Alarms: 10 alarm metrics for standard-resolution alarms that list metrics directly.
  • Application Signals with transaction search: 3 months free, up to 100 GB ingested and 1 million spans indexed per account.
  • Application Signals without transaction spans: 3 months free, up to 100 million signals per account.
  • Cross-account observability: First trace copy sent from a source account to a monitoring account is free.
  • X-Ray traces: First 100,000 traces recorded each month are free; first 1,000,000 traces retrieved or scanned each month are free.
  • Synthetics: 100 canary runs per month.
  • RUM: First 1 million web RUM events per account are free.
  • Database Insights Standard Mode: Rolling 7 days of performance data history for the database load metric.
  • Network Monitoring flow monitoring: 10 monitored resources free for the first 12 months, up to 7,300 resource-hours per month.
53
Amazon EventBridgeFree tier
  • AWS management events ingested by the event bus at no cost.
  • EventBridge Scheduler with up to 14,000,000 invocations per month free.
  • Schema Registry usage for AWS and custom schemas at no cost.
  • Schema Discovery with up to 5,000,000 ingested events per month free.
52$14 / month
AWS LambdaFree tier
  • One million free requests per month for Lambda function invocations.
  • 400,000 GB-seconds of compute time per month for x86 and Graviton2 functions, in aggregate.
  • 100 GiB of HTTP response streaming per month, beyond the first 6 MB per request, which are free.
49$6.87 / month
AWS X-RayFree tier
  • Access to AWS X-Ray traces: The first 100,000 traces recorded each month are free.
  • Access to AWS X-Ray trace retrieval and scanning: The first 1,000,000 traces retrieved or scanned each month are free.
49
AWS Certificate ManagerFree tier
  • Non-exportable public certificates at no additional cost.
  • First 10,000 export-certificate API calls per account each month at no cost.
48$7.00 / month
Amazon NeptuneIntro tier
  • 750 hours of a Neptune db.t3.medium or db.t4g.medium instance for 30 days.
  • 10 million I/O requests.
  • 1 GB of storage.
  • 1 GB of backup storage.
47$22 / month
Amazon Q DeveloperFree tier
  • Access to 50 agentic requests per month for Q&A chat and agentic coding in the IDE or CLI.
  • 1,000 lines of code per month for Java upgrade transformations.
  • Reference tracking for code suggestions and responses.
  • Ability to suppress public code suggestions.
  • Opt-out data collection controls.
  • General Q&A in the AWS Console.
  • Diagnosis of common errors in the AWS Console.
  • Free tier limits in the IDE for Builder ID users only.
  • Free tier limits in the AWS Console for users with console access only.
  • Free tier limits for AWS Console Mobile App, AWS Chatbot, and AWS marketing/documentation pages.
47$6.00 / month
Amazon RDSIntro tier
  • Up to 750 instance hours per month on select single-AZ databases for 12 months.
  • Eligible engines: MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, or SQL Server Express Edition only.
  • 20 GB of General Purpose SSD (gp2) storage per month for 1 year.
  • 20 GB of automated database backup storage per month for 1 year.
  • Free Tier credits valid for up to 12 months for post-July 15, 2025 signups.
  • $100 in credits, plus up to an additional $100 for foundational AWS services, for eligible post-July 15, 2025 signups.
46$21 / month
Amazon Aurora DSQLFree tier
  • First 100,000 DPUs free each month, covering database activity.
  • 1 GB of storage free each month, covering stored data.
  • Automatic monthly application of free tier credits to your bill.
  • Free tier applies per management account under AWS Organizations.
45$2.97 / month
Amazon API GatewayIntro tier
  • One million REST API calls received per month for up to 12 months.
  • One million HTTP API calls received per month for up to 12 months.
  • One million WebSocket messages per month for up to 12 months.
  • 750,000 WebSocket connection minutes per month for up to 12 months.
  • Available only to new AWS customers.
  • Free tier usage expires after 12 months from AWS sign-up date.
  • Usage beyond monthly free limits is billed at standard API Gateway rates.
43
Elastic Load BalancingIntro tier
  • Up to 750 hours per month shared between Classic and Application Load Balancers.
  • Up to 15 GB of data processing for Classic Load Balancers.
  • Up to 15 LCUs for Application Load Balancers.
43
Amazon EC2Intro tier
  • Amazon EC2 free tier access with no-cost usage for eligible new accounts.
  • Up to 750 hours per month of t2.micro or t3.micro instances, depending on Region.
  • Access to Linux, Windows, or other eligible micro instances included in the free tier.
  • Up to 30 GB of EBS storage included for free tier instance volumes.
  • Up to 2 million I/O requests for EBS included in the free tier.
  • Up to 1 GB of snapshot storage included for EBS backups.
42$12 / month
Amazon DynamoDBFree tier
  • 25 WCUs and 25 RCUs per month for provisioned capacity on DynamoDB Standard tables.
  • 25 rWCUs for global tables across two AWS Regions.
  • 25 GB of data storage per month on DynamoDB Standard tables.
  • 2.5 million DynamoDB Streams read requests per month.
  • 1 GB of data transfer out per month, aggregated across AWS services.
40$8.50 / month
Amazon SQSFree tier
  • Access to 1 million Amazon SQS requests per month, free of charge.
  • Monthly free tier usage applies across all regions except GovCloud.
  • Unused free tier requests do not roll over to the next month.
  • Automatic free tier application to eligible usage on your bill.
40$1.00 / month
AWS CodeCommitFree tier
  • Access to 1 active user per month, with no charge if the user does not access CodeCommit.
  • Up to 50 GB-month of storage for repositories.
  • Up to 10,000 Git requests per month.
  • Indefinite free tier availability for new and existing AWS customers.
40$1.17 / month
Amazon CloudFrontFree tier
  • Access to CloudFront CDN with 1M requests per month.
  • Includes 100GB data transfer per month.
  • Includes DNS.
  • Includes always-on DDoS protection.
  • Includes serverless edge compute.
  • Includes 5 WAF rules for basic web threat protection.
  • Includes 5GB of S3 storage credits per month.
  • No overage charges on the free plan.
39$1.00 / month
Amazon Elastic Block StoreIntro tier
  • 30 GB of EBS storage included.
  • 2 million EBS I/O operations included.
  • 1 GB of EBS snapshot storage included.
  • Access to Amazon EBS General Purpose SSD volumes (gp3 and gp2).
  • Access to Amazon EBS Throughput Optimized HDD volumes (st1).
  • Access to Amazon EBS Cold HDD volumes (sc1).
  • Up to $200 in AWS Free Tier credits for eligible AWS services, including Amazon EBS.
  • Free plan available for 6 months after account creation.
  • Free Tier credits must be used within 12 months of account creation.
35$3.00 / month
Amazon S3Free credit
  • Up to $200 in AWS Free Tier credits for eligible AWS services, including Amazon S3.
  • Free plan available for 6 months after account creation.
  • Credits must be used within 12 months of account creation.
  • Remaining Free Tier credits automatically apply to AWS bills if you upgrade to a paid plan.
35$200 one-time credit
AWS CodePipelineFree tier
  • One free active V1 pipeline per month, for pipelines older than 30 days with at least one code change run through them.
  • 100 free action execution minutes per month for V2 pipelines, shared across all V2 pipelines in the account.
  • Free minutes reset at the start of each calendar month; unused minutes do not carry over.
35<$1 / month
AWS CodeBuildFree tier
  • 100 total build minutes per month with general1.small or arm1.small on-demand Amazon EC2 compute.
  • 6,000 total build seconds per month with lambda.arm.1GB or lambda.x86-64.1GB on-demand Lambda compute.
  • Available to new and existing AWS customers.
  • Does not automatically expire at the end of the 12-month AWS Free Tier term.
31<$1 / month
AWS Step FunctionsFree tier
  • 4,000 free state transitions per month for Standard Workflows.
  • Free tier does not automatically expire after 12 months; available indefinitely to new and existing AWS customers.
  • Applies only to Standard Workflows state transitions; charges begin above the free tier.
  • Retry attempts in workflows count as additional state transitions and consume free tier usage.
31<$1 / month
Amazon SESIntro tier
  • Up to 3,000 message charges per month for the first 12 months after starting SES.
  • Applies to outbound emails, inbound emails, and Virtual Deliverability Manager outbound email processing.
  • One sent email counts as one message charge.
  • One received email counts as one message charge.
  • With Virtual Deliverability Manager enabled, each sent email counts as two message charges.
  • Free tier message charges are applied to the most expensive eligible charges first.
  • Free tier credits for new AWS customers can be used toward eligible SES usage.
  • Free plan is available for 6 months after account creation for new AWS customers starting July 15, 2025.
27<$1 / month
Amazon SNSFree tier
  • Free usage tier details for Amazon SNS are not explicitly listed in the provided content.
  • The page states new AWS customers receive 15 GB of data transfer out each month across all AWS services for one year.
  • Data transferred into Amazon SNS is free of charge.
  • Data transferred between Amazon SNS and Amazon EC2 within a single region is free of charge.
0

When the free tier runs out

For AWS services that publish a paid plan, here's the cheapest next step up once you outgrow the free allowance.

AWS free tier gotchas

The July 2025 credit-based model

Accounts created on or after July 15, 2025 no longer get the old "12 months free" structure across the board. New signups instead receive an account-wide credit that depletes as you use paid services, alongside a smaller set of services that stay free indefinitely. Read the specifics before you architect around the old rules. Read the full breakdown: AWS free tier changes, July 2025: what you need to know.

12-month intro allowances step down

8 of the services on this page are classified intro-tier: a larger allowance for an account’s first year, then a drop to a smaller permanent free tier (or none at all) once that year ends. Check the intro-tier badge in the table below to see which ones.

Quotas are per region, not per account

Most AWS free allowances reset per AWS region rather than pooling across your whole account. Spinning up the same workload in a second region does not double your usage against a single shared quota, but it does mean tracking consumption region by region.

Data egress falls outside most allowances

Free tiers on compute and storage services typically cover the resource itself - instance hours, GB stored - but not the bandwidth to move data out to the internet. Egress is billed separately on most services and is a common source of surprise charges.

Change timeline

Last verified Aug 18, 2026.

FAQ

Is AWS's free tier permanent?

Of the 25 AWS services with a free tier, 16 offer a permanent recurring free allowance, 8 are time-limited introductory or trial offers, and 1 hands out a one-time signup credit.

Which AWS service has the best free tier?

AWS Security Agent scores highest of AWS's services with a free tier, with an FTV score of 72 out of 100 and an estimated value of $1,000 / month.

How many AWS services have a free tier?

25 AWS services offer a genuine free tier.

Does AWS give new accounts free credit?

Yes - AWS hands new accounts $200 in one-time signup credit, which you spend on usage at normal rates until it runs out or expires. That credit is separate from the recurring free allowances, which don't draw it down.

What happens when I outgrow AWS's free tier?

Each service moves to its own paid plan. 25 of 25 AWS services publish a price for what comes after the free tier.

See every AWS product's full listing in our Amazon Web Services company profile, or browse the other provider guides: Azure, GCP, Cloudflare.