Comprehensive guide to every AWS free tier service in 2026. Always Free, 12-month, and trial tiers explained. Aurora PostgreSQL Serverless just added. Hidden costs, gotchas, and cheaper alternatives compared.
Published 2026-03-27 · Not yet reviewed · Data verified from our index of 1,547 developer tools · 21 AWS entries tracked
Three tiers, very different rules. AWS bundles "free tier" into three categories that work completely differently. Always Free services never expire — Lambda, DynamoDB, and SNS stay free forever within limits. 12-Month Free services (EC2, RDS, S3) expire silently after your first year and start billing. Short-Term Trials give limited access to premium services. Most "AWS free tier" guides conflate these. We don't.
What's new: Aurora PostgreSQL Serverless was added to the AWS Free Tier in March 2026 — the first time AWS's flagship managed PostgreSQL has been available at no cost. New accounts also get $100–$200 in credits.
The hidden costs: AWS's free tier is generous but has well-known traps — data transfer charges, NAT Gateway fees, idle Elastic IPs, and EBS volumes on stopped instances. We cover all of them below.
Comparing clouds? See our Cloud Free Tier Comparison for a side-by-side matrix of AWS vs GCP vs Azure vs DigitalOcean.
These services remain free indefinitely within their monthly limits. No expiration, no credit card surprises after 12 months. This is the safest tier for long-running side projects.
| Service | Free Limits | Category |
|---|---|---|
| AWS Lambda Source ↗ | 1M requests/month, 400K GB-seconds compute | Compute |
| Amazon DynamoDB | 25 GB storage, 25 WCU/RCU provisioned capacity | Database |
| Amazon S3 | 5 GB standard storage, 20K GET, 2K PUT requests/month (12-month) | Storage |
| Amazon SNS | 1M publishes, 100K HTTP deliveries, 1K email deliveries/month | Messaging |
| Amazon SQS | 1M requests/month | Messaging |
| Amazon CloudWatch | 10 custom metrics, 10 alarms, 1M API requests/month | Monitoring |
| Amazon ECR Public Unsourced | 50 GB storage, unlimited public image pulls | Containers |
| AWS CloudFormation | Unlimited for AWS resources (third-party charges may apply) | IaC |
| Amazon Cognito | 50K MAUs (Monthly Active Users) | Auth |
| AWS CodeCommit Source ↗ | 5 active users, 50 GB storage, 10K Git requests/month | DevOps |
| AWS CodePipeline Source ↗ | 1 free active pipeline/month | DevOps |
| AWS CodeBuild Source ↗ | 100 build minutes/month (general1.small) | DevOps |
| AWS X-Ray Source ↗ | 100K traces recorded, 1M traces scanned/month | Monitoring |
| AWS Step Functions Source ↗ | 4,000 state transitions/month | Compute |
| Amazon SES Source ↗ | No free tier — $200 in expiring AWS credits, then $0.10/1,000 emails |
Available for 12 months from account creation. After that, standard pricing applies with no automatic notification. Set a billing alarm on day one.
| Service | Free Limits | Category |
|---|---|---|
| Amazon EC2 | 750 hrs/month t2.micro or t3.micro (Linux/Windows) | Compute |
| Amazon RDS | 750 hrs/month db.t2.micro or db.t3.micro, 20 GB storage | Database |
| ★ Aurora PostgreSQL Serverless | Up to 4 ACUs per cluster, 1 GB storage (NEW — March 2026) | Database |
| Amazon S3 | 5 GB standard storage, 20K GET, 2K PUT requests/month | Storage |
| Amazon CloudFront | 1 TB data transfer out, 10M HTTP/HTTPS requests/month | CDN |
| Amazon ElastiCache | 750 hrs/month cache.t2.micro or cache.t3.micro | Database |
| Amazon OpenSearch | 750 hrs/month t2.small.search or t3.small.search | Search |
| Amazon Redshift | 750 hrs/month dc2.large node, 2 months free trial | Data Warehouse |
| AWS Amplify Hosting Source ↗ | 1K build minutes/month, 15 GB served, 5 GB storage | Hosting |
Limited-time trials for premium services. Useful for evaluation, not for ongoing projects.
| Service | Free Limits | Category |
|---|---|---|
| Amazon SageMaker | 250 hrs/month ml.t3.medium for Studio notebooks (2 months) | AI/ML |
| Amazon Bedrock | Select foundation models with limited free inference (varies by model) | AI/ML |
| Amazon Q Developer Source ↗ | Inline suggestions, chat, 50 agent invocations/month (always free for individuals) | AI Coding |
| Amazon AppStream 2.0 | 40 hrs/month stream.standard.small (first 12 months) | Desktop |
| Amazon Lightsail | 750 hrs/month of 512 MB instance (3 months free) | Hosting |
Common use cases and which free services to combine. All stacks below can run at zero cost within AWS free tier limits.
Lambda + DynamoDB + API Gateway + S3 + CloudFront. Serverless, scales to zero, always free within limits. Best for REST/GraphQL APIs serving <1M requests/month.
Aurora PostgreSQL Serverless (NEW) for managed PostgreSQL with auto-scaling. RDS PostgreSQL (750 hrs t3.micro) for traditional single-instance. DynamoDB (25 GB always free) for NoSQL. See our Neon vs Supabase comparison for PostgreSQL alternatives.
CodeBuild (100 min/month) + CodePipeline (1 free pipeline) + ECR Public (50 GB). Enough for a small team's build/deploy workflow. For more capacity, see CI/CD alternatives.
SageMaker Studio Lab (free, no AWS account needed) + Bedrock free tier models + Amazon Q Developer (free individual tier). For more options, see our AI/ML tools guide.
S3 (5 GB) + CloudFront (1 TB transfer/month) + Route 53 (not free — $0.50/hosted zone). Or use Cloudflare Pages (unlimited, always free) as an alternative.
AWS's free tier is generous, but these costs catch almost every new user. The #1 cause of surprise AWS bills isn't usage — it's infrastructure that runs when you're not looking.
First 100 GB/month free to internet, then $0.09/GB. Transfers between regions always charged. This is the #1 surprise cost.
If your Lambda/ECS needs internet access in a VPC, NAT Gateway costs $0.045/hr + $0.045/GB. Running 24/7 = $32/month before data.
Free when attached to a running instance. Charged $0.005/hr (~$3.60/month) when idle or unattached. Easy to forget.
Basic monitoring is free (5-minute intervals). Detailed monitoring (1-minute) costs $2.10/metric/month. EC2 auto-enables it in some launch configs.
You pay for EBS storage even when EC2 instances are stopped. 30 GB gp3 = $2.40/month sitting idle.
12-month services silently convert to paid after year one. No warning email by default. Set a billing alarm on day one.
Storage is cheap but requests add up. PUT/COPY/POST at $0.005/1K requests. A deployment pipeline doing thousands of S3 operations can cost more in requests than storage.
RDS Multi-AZ doubles your cost. The free tier only covers single-AZ. Some tutorials default to Multi-AZ.
AWS has the broadest free tier, but smaller providers often offer more generous limits for specific use cases. Here's how they compare for developers building side projects or MVPs.
| Provider | Key Free Tier | Best For |
|---|---|---|
| GCP (Google Cloud) Source ↗ | Always Free: e2-micro VM, 1 TiB BigQuery, Cloud Run 2M req/mo | Side projects needing a persistent VM |
| Azure Source ↗ | 12-month: VMs, SQL, Cosmos DB (1K RU/s + 25 GB). $200 credit | Teams already on Microsoft stack |
| Railway Source ↗ | $5 free trial credit, usage-based pricing after | Quick prototypes, hobby projects |
| Render Source ↗ | Free web services (512 MB RAM), free PostgreSQL (90 days) | Replacing Heroku for small apps |
| Supabase Source ↗ | 500 MB database, 50K MAU auth, 1 GB storage | Firebase alternative with SQL |
| Neon Source ↗ | 512 MiB storage, 190 compute hours, branching | Database-only needs with branching |
| Cloudflare Source ↗ | Workers 100K req/day, R2 10 GB, D1 5 GB, Pages unlimited | Global edge apps, static sites, storage |
| Vercel Source ↗ | Unlimited deploys (hobby), 100 GB bandwidth, serverless functions | Frontend apps and Jamstack sites |
AWS free tier changes we've tracked. See the full timeline for all 554 tracked changes across all providers.
| Date | Service | Change | Impact |
|---|---|---|---|
| effective Oct 7, 2026 | AWS | AWS Proton end of support. Infrastructure-as-code provisioning service being retired. All environments, services, and templates will stop working. Source ↗ | MEDIUM |
| effective Sep 30, 2026 | AWS | AWS App Mesh end of support. Service mesh for ECS/EKS being fully retired. All configurations, virtual nodes, and routes will stop functioning. Source ↗ | MEDIUM |
| discovered Sep 7, 2026 · effective date unknown | AWS Activate | The AWS Activate program now offers up to $200,000 in credits, an increase from $100,000 for VC/accelerator-backed startups. The description of credits for AI startups building on custom silicon is no longer present. Source ↗ | MEDIUM |
| discovered Sep 3, 2026 · effective date unknown | Amazon Kiro | The tier names have changed. 'Pro+' is now 'Pro Max'. There is a new 'Pro Max' tier at $100/month for 5,000 credits. The sign-up bonus is now $20 towards a paid plan, instead of 500 bonus credits. Add-on credits are available for all paid tiers and cost $0.04/credit, with packs ranging from $5 to $100. Unused add-on credits roll over for 12 months. Source ↗ | MEDIUM |
| discovered Sep 2, 2026 · effective date unknown | GitHub Actions | The free tier for private repositories includes 2,000 minutes, 500MB artifact storage, and 10GB cache storage. The pricing page details specific per-minute costs for different runner types (Linux, Windows, macOS) and storage costs ($0.25/GB/month for shared storage, $0.07/GB for Actions cache and custom image storage), indicating that usage beyond the free quota is paid. This is not reflected in the current pricing page text. Source ↗ | HIGH |
| discovered Aug 28, 2026 · effective date unknown | Amazon ECR Public | The free tier for public repositories is now 50 GB/month, up from 500 MB/month. The anonymous data transfer limit is 500 GB/month, and with an AWS account, it's 5 TB/month. Source ↗ | LOW |
| effective Jun 30, 2026 | AWS | AWS Fargate Platform Version 1.3.0 end of support. Tasks on PV 1.3.0 will stop running. Migration to Platform Version 1.4.0+ required. Source ↗ | MEDIUM |
| effective Apr 30, 2026 | AWS | AWS App Runner closed to new customers. Service enters maintenance mode with no new features. AWS recommends migrating to Amazon ECS Express Mode for simplified container deployment. Source ↗ | HIGH |
| effective Apr 30, 2026 | AWS | Node.js 20 AWS Lambda runtime 3-phase deprecation begins. Phase 1 (April 30): no new function creation. Phase 2 (June 30): no function updates. Phase 3 (August 30): no invocations. Source ↗ | HIGH |
| effective Apr 20, 2026 | AWS | AWS WorkSpaces Thin Client end of availability. AWS stopping sales of Thin Client devices. Existing devices continue working but no new hardware can be purchased. Source ↗ | LOW |
A source check reads each cited page for that service's name and a price; the figures in the tables above are from our own records.
Search AWS free tier services, compare with alternatives, and track pricing changes — all from your AI coding assistant.
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