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 · Reviewed 2026-09-13, corrections outstanding · Figures compiled 2026-03-27 · 9 of 9 figures in the “Recent AWS Changes” table come from our records for 1,574 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.
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 Unconfirmed | 50 GB storage, unlimited public image pulls | Containers |
| AWS CloudFormation | Unlimited for AWS resources (third-party charges may apply) | IaC |
| Amazon Cognito | 10,000 MAUs a month (Lite or Essentials tier, direct or social sign-in); 50 MAUs for SAML/OIDC. User pools created by November 22, 2024 keep 50,000 on Lite. | 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.
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 months: 750 hours each of B2pts v2 and B2ats v2 VMs. Always free: SQL Database (100K vCore seconds/mo, 32 GB), Cosmos DB (1K RU/s, 25 GB). $200 credit for 30 days, then pay-as-you-go to keep the free services. | 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 (30 days) | Replacing Heroku for small apps |
| Supabase Source ↗ | 500 MB database, 50K MAU auth, 1 GB storage | Firebase alternative with SQL |
| Neon Source ↗ | 100 CU-hours and 0.5 GB storage per project, auth up to 60k MAU, branching | Serverless Postgres with branching and scale-to-zero |
| Cloudflare Source ↗ | Workers 100K req/day, R2 10 GB, D1 5 GB, Pages unlimited | Global edge apps, static sites, storage |
| Vercel Source ↗ | Hobby plan (personal, non-commercial use only): 100 deployments/day, 100 GB Fast Data Transfer/month, 1M function invocations/month. | Frontend apps and Jamstack sites |
AWS free tier changes we've tracked. See the full timeline for all 476 tracked changes across all providers.
| Date | Service | Change | Impact |
|---|---|---|---|
| effective Oct 7, 2026 | AWS | AWS Proton reaches end of support on 2026-10-07, when its console and resources stop being accessible. AWS: "Your deployed CloudFormation stacks and the resources they manage will remain intact and continue to function." New customers could not sign up after 2025-10-07. Source ↗ | MEDIUM |
| effective Sep 30, 2026 | AWS | AWS App Mesh reaches end of support on 2026-09-30. AWS: "After September 30, 2026, you will no longer be able to access the AWS App Mesh console or AWS App Mesh resources." AWS points App Mesh users to Amazon ECS Service Connect. Source ↗ | MEDIUM |
| 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 Jul 10, 2026 | Amazon Kiro | Kiro added a Pro Max plan at $100 per user a month with 5,000 credits, between Pro+ and Power. It first appears on kiro.dev/pricing between the 2026-06-03 and 2026-07-10 captures. Source ↗ | LOW |
| effective Jun 30, 2026 | AWS | Fargate platform version 1.3.0 reached end of support on June 30, 2026. AWS blocked new tasks and services on it from June 15 and said it would terminate the tasks still running on it on June 30. Platform version 1.4.0 replaces it. Source ↗ | MEDIUM |
| effective Jun 14, 2026 | AWS Activate | AWS raised Activate Portfolio from up to $100,000 to up to $200,000 in credits. aws.amazon.com/startups/credits/ said "Up to $100,000 USD AWS Activate Credits" in the Internet Archive's capture of 2026-05-31 and "Up to $200,000 USD in Activate Credits" in the capture of 2026-06-14. Source ↗ | MEDIUM |
| effective Jun 3, 2026 | Amazon Kiro | Kiro stopped giving new users 500 bonus credits on sign-up, usable within 30 days, and now credits $20 toward the first paid plan instead. The change falls between the 2026-05-02 and 2026-06-03 captures of kiro.dev/pricing. 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 | The Node.js 20 Lambda runtime (nodejs20.x) was deprecated on 2026-04-30. Lambda blocks creating functions on it from 2027-02-01 and updating them from 2027-03-03; AWS's runtime page says "you can continue to invoke your functions indefinitely". 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, except for the services whose entry below dates them to a read of the vendor's own page.
Search AWS free tier services, compare with alternatives, and track pricing changes — all from your AI coding assistant.
claude mcp add agentdeals -- npx -y agentdealsWorks with Claude Desktop, Cursor, Cline, Windsurf → Full setup guide