AWS Free Tier Changes on July 15, 2025

https://freetier.co/articles/aws-free-tier-changes-july-15-2025

by coop182 • 1 year ago

54 45 1 year ago

freetier.co

vivzkestrel• 1 year ago

looks like an attempt by them to stop gaming the system

Animats2• 1 year ago

No more running on free tier forever. "6-month maximum duration".

bigstrat2003• 1 year ago

But you never could? The free tier has always ended after 12 months.

Animats2• 1 year ago

Hm. Does the "always free" tier remain free after 6 months? [1] Or do you have to pay something to keep the account alive?

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/free/database/?p=ft&z=subnav&...

reactordev2• 1 year ago

Honestly, if they really cared about devs, they would increase their enterprise support contract prices by 0.01% and have a “solo-dev tier” be free forever…

1 t4, 1 Aurora, 10GB bucket, and a dream…

mcny• 1 year ago

For students to learn effectively, they need a safe harbor. The most critical offering for learners on AWS is a free or prepaid account tier that completely eliminates the risk of surprise bills, allowing them to focus purely on their education.

If the free forever portion includes a t4g.small, 1 aurora, a 10 GB S3 bucket, that would be perfect.

I am not holding my breath though.

galenko• 1 year ago

Didn’t oracle cloud offer something like that free forever?

reactordev2• 1 year ago

That’s exactly what would make AWS sticky. A safe harbor for students to learn and build solutions using AWS without a surprise $400-$5000 bill. One experience like that, and you’ll be shopping on Newegg for a closet rack.

whattheheckheck• 1 year ago

If you rack up a big bill at work you don't get a refund , so the students need to learn finops the hard way too

lazystar3• 1 year ago

have a “solo-dev tier” be free forever…

i could see a $10/month sub being a thing, but free forever... cmon, you know ppl would abuse the hell outta that.

arccy• 1 year ago

GCP manages to do it, AWS are just greedy and bad at DX

paulryanrogers2• 1 year ago

If you go with a paid plan and only consume the "always free" services, then I guess it's still basically free? Except perhaps for any paid service you absolutely cannot opt out of for your use case.

Ah well, there's always LocalStack for test environments.

wiether2• 1 year ago

You'll probably reach Localstack's free-tier's limits sooner than the ones of an AWS Free Plan.

paulryanrogers2• 1 year ago

They each have different limits. And LS can run locally, without an Internet access. So at least there is choice.

charcircuit• 1 year ago

If AWS could lower their bandwidth prices by 99% it would revolutionize the internet.

dsign• 1 year ago

> Using Amazon Bedrock playground

I’m calling out more LLM force-feeding! Why are rich corporations so hell-bent on replacing humans? Does Jeff Bezos think he will rule the Machines after they get rid of the plebeians?

burnt-resistor• 1 year ago

The morbidly greedy cede nothing when they can gain more money and power, and they're so far removed from the needs and plight of the rest of humanity because they've probably haven't seen, much less talked to, anyone more than one rung down on the socioeconomic strata in decades. Whatever happens to the "little people" or the planet is fine, and isn't their concern.

wiether2• 1 year ago

When I saw an official "Free Plan" that is automatically deleted after six months, I thought that was a good move: now students could open an account, experiment for absolutely free for six months without the fear of unplanned costs being charged on their credit card, either when experimenting or months/years later because they forgot about their account and some hacker managed to get access to it.

But according to the FAQ "Why do I need to provide payment method to sign up if I’m on the free plan?", it seems you still have to provide a payment method. So, technically, during the six months lifespan of your "Free Plan" account, you still can end-up being charged for some services, if you go over you $100(+$100) "free" credits.

Unless they have an absolute hard limit on the services you can use under a "Free Plan" making it impossible to go over your $100(+$100) credits; but that would be a first and people would ask to have the same ability to put those limits on a regular account...

So I see some progress, but it seems that it's not as safe of an offering as it should be for a "Free Plan".

vasco2• 1 year ago

But they'll say their favorite line which is that it can be very disruptive to customers for them to stop the spend, how could they possibly know what to stop in your account?? Always easy to find reasons to explain something when the result is more money for you.

gkbrk• 1 year ago

Once they need to stop your spending, the following has to happen

- VMs deleted, along with all the files on them

- S3 buckets emptied

- DNS queries no longer getting answered

- Databases dropped, backups deleted

This is not just something disruptive that can be fixed by spending money again. Even if you stop customer traffic, all these resources are still used and cost money.

For a professional account this is insane. And even for a student account this would be a very bad day. I'd hate for this to happen as a student, because I had a bunch of important stuff there when I was a student.

tonyhart72• 1 year ago

"Why do I need to provide payment method to sign up if I’m on the free plan?"

its also to prevent abuse, from people making a mass account only abusing free tier

throwaway290• 1 year ago

yep and you can use aws itself for stuff like billing alerts -> automation to shut things down...

Traubenfuchs2• 1 year ago

I have a terraformed 4 node kubernetes cluster with 6GB RAM each running on the oracle cloud free tier.

I don‘t know why people bother with any other cloud if they are free tier level hobbyists.

trvz• 1 year ago

As another advocate for Oracle Cloud, I think people primarily aren't aware of it, and if they are they are put off by Oracle's reputation, even though Oracle Cloud is no worse than AWS/GC/Azure.

floating-io2• 1 year ago

Signing up for services with a notoriously complex pricing structure, under the auspices of a company that is infamous for auditing its customers and forcing more money out of them on the basis of technicalities under threat of legal action, seems... unwise... to me.

dizhn3• 1 year ago

It's known to be pretty sketchy in terms of who can actually get it. Their new user procedure is a super slow web app that refuses to create a user for opaque reasons, the most reliable of which seemingly being your location. In other words, a lot of people who want it cannot get it.

dizhn3• 1 year ago

That's more than one free tier account can support. Make sure you're not actually paying for it.

Traubenfuchs2• 1 year ago

Stop spreading misinformation.

For Always Free tenancies, this is equivalent to 4 OCPUs and 24 GB of memory.

https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/FreeTier/freetier...

AWS Free Tier Changes on July 15, 2025

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