Yes, Amazon CloudWatch has a permanent free tier alongside its paid plans.
About
Amazon CloudWatch is AWS’s monitoring and observability service for applications, infrastructure, and operational data. It helps teams collect metrics, logs, and traces, visualize system health, and investigate issues across cloud and hybrid environments.
The service supports dashboards, alarms, anomaly detection, log analytics, application observability, infrastructure observability, and network monitoring. It also integrates with open standards such as OpenTelemetry and works with AWS-native and open-source observability tools to support troubleshooting at scale.
- Unified visibility across metrics, logs, and traces
- Dashboards, alarms, and anomaly detection for operations
- Application, infrastructure, and network observability features
- OpenTelemetry support and compatibility with open-source tools
- AI-assisted investigations and observability workflows
Free Tier Value
This free tier is a broad monthly allowance rather than a time-limited trial, and it covers several practical CloudWatch basics: logs, metrics, dashboards, alarms, X-Ray, Synthetics, RUM, and some observability features. At AWS’s paid rates, the included quotas are worth roughly $25/month for a small developer workload, but a credit card is still required to create the account and usage beyond the caps is billed separately.
What's included in the free tier
Verified
- 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.
See Amazon CloudWatch pricing for current limits.
Paid plans
CloudWatch paid usage
- logs
- billed by usage
- metrics
- billed by usage
- dashboards
- billed by usage
- alarms
- billed by usage
- Logs ingestion, storage, and Logs Insights scanning beyond free tier
- Custom metrics and detailed monitoring beyond free tier
- Dashboards, alarms, and API requests beyond free tier
- Application Observability, X-Ray, Synthetics, RUM, and Infrastructure Observability beyond free tier
Pricing extracted from Amazon CloudWatch's pricing page. Always verify current pricing before committing.
Common questions
Is Amazon CloudWatch free forever?
Yes. Amazon CloudWatch has a permanent free tier alongside its paid plans, though the allowance typically resets each month.
What is Amazon CloudWatch's free tier worth?
Amazon CloudWatch's free tier is worth about $25 per month. That maps to an FTV score of 55/100. The FTV score is explained at freetier.co/ftv.
