A long-standing issue with the old Free Tier

Recently, AWS released a new, revamped Free Tier model, and it's actually a really nice change for anyone just starting out with AWS. I probably shouldn't say this on a post about AWS, but for a long time I envied Azure and GCP folks for having access to a nice, credit based free tier for newcomers. Meanwhile, on AWS, while still having a nice free tier, you still had to hook up your credit card and could by accident rack up a pretty huge bill if you weren't careful enough, and it's easy to miss that part if you're just a newcomer, learning about AWS and cloud computing in general.

Over the past few years, I've been running workshops and giving guest lectures on AWS for students at the Silesian University of Technology, and one thing that kept popping up in questions was the fact that students were just scared of signing up and entering they credit card into AWS, as they've seen the blogposts or head the "horror" stories of people either getting "hacked" or by mistake getting a huge bill that they completely didn't expect. While you can limit the risk of that by setting up billing alerts, it's still not the most convenient way of getting started with AWS.

What changes in 2025

The new Free Tier model works quite differently (similar to models that Azure or GCP support):

• New accounts get $100 in credits at signup.
• Another $100 in credits can be obtained by completing 5 additional onboarding activities, like launching an EC2 instance or deploying a Lambda.
• Credits are valid for 6 months.
• Once the credits run out or expire, you can upgrade to a paid plan or the account just stops being functional.

Why it's a win

In my opinion, the main purpose of the free tier is to let people experiment with the cloud and various services, not to give them a "free" ec2 instance to run their application on, and that new model supports that much much better. Also, as it's credit-based, you no longer have the risk of ending up with 5k USD bill because you forgot to turn off SageMaker. I'm really happy for the upcoming workshops and lectures, as now the main worry that the students have about learning AWS on their own account will be gone.

Thanks for reading!