Amazon S3 gives new accounts a $200 one-time signup credit rather than an ongoing free tier. The free plan includes up to $200 in AWS Free Tier credits for eligible AWS services, including Amazon S3, free plan available for 6 months after account creation, and Credits must be used within 12 months of account creation.
About
Amazon S3 is an object storage service designed to store, manage, analyze, and protect data at virtually any scale. It supports a wide range of workloads, including data lakes, cloud-native applications, mobile apps, backup and archive workflows, AI and analytics pipelines, and semantic search.
The service provides multiple storage classes and management capabilities to help organizations balance performance, durability, security, and cost. It also includes specialized capabilities for table data, vector storage, file access, replication, transfer acceleration, and storage analytics.
- Highly scalable object storage with strong durability and availability
- Multiple storage classes for frequent, infrequent, archival, and high-performance access patterns
- Security, encryption, access control, and auditing capabilities
- Support for analytics, AI, backup, archive, and application data workloads
- Specialized offerings including S3 Tables, S3 Vectors, S3 Files, and transfer acceleration
Free Tier Value
This free tier is a time-limited AWS credit offer rather than a recurring monthly allowance, so a monthly value would be misleading. The page says eligible users get up to $200 in AWS Free Tier credits, which is meaningful but capped and spread across AWS services, and a credit card is typically required to create the account. Because the offer is introductory and expires after the credit window, it scores as a modest but real starter value rather than an ongoing free plan.
What's included in the free tier
Verified
- 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.
See Amazon S3 pricing for current limits.
Paid plans
Amazon S3
- Storage pricing varies by storage class
- Request and data retrieval charges
- Data transfer and transfer acceleration pricing
- Data management and insights feature pricing
- Replication pricing
- Transform and query feature pricing
S3 Files
- Shared file system linked to an S3 bucket
- Low-latency file access for active working set
- Reads of large files can bypass file-system charges
- Automatic expiration of inactive data from high-performance storage
S3 Tables
- Analytics-optimized table storage
- Automatic table maintenance and compaction
- Storage, request, and monitoring charges
- Replication pricing available
S3 Glacier API
- Archive storage access via direct API
- Separate API pricing from S3 storage pricing
Pricing extracted from Amazon S3's pricing page. Always verify current pricing before committing.
Common questions
Is Amazon S3 free forever?
No. Amazon S3 gives new accounts a one-time signup credit of about $200, spent at normal usage rates, then the account moves to pay-as-you-go.
What is Amazon S3's free tier worth?
Amazon S3's free tier is worth about $200 in signup credit. That maps to an FTV score of 35/100. The FTV score is explained at freetier.co/ftv.
