AWS Free Tier Changes on July 15, 2025

looks like an attempt by them to stop gaming the system

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

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…

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.

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.

> 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.

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

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

>> 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?

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.

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

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".

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

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

Oracle clouds free offerings are very generous. But then your using Oracle.

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.

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.

Not an issue for many of us, other than possible issues with export restrictions, then again that applies to any US based technology now, if the administration keeps getting creative. They went after penguins after all.

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.

Why?

>- VMs deleted, along with all the files on them

VMs shut down, deleted after a specified time period (7 days, whatever, the exact time period doesn't matter)

>- S3 buckets emptied

S3 buckets no longer accessible, emptied after a specified time period

>- DNS queries no longer getting answered

Yep, fine

>- Databases dropped, backups deleted

Database access revoked, backup access revoked, deleted after a specified time period.

There is no reason this has to be an immediate deletion. Heck, even if you request they delete something they probably don't do it immediately and just mark it "deleted" until it's cleaned up after time.

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.

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&...

is the GCP free tier in the room with us now?

in all seriousness, would love a link.

Not many people know this, but Google also makes a search engine!

https://cloud.google.com/free/docs/free-cloud-features#compu...

is the word "forever" in the fine-print somewhere?

> The Free Tier has no end date, but Google reserves the right to change the offering, including changing or eliminating usage limits, subject to 30 days advance notice.

It's been available for as long as I can remember GCP existing. Obviously no company will or even could guarantee something like this will be provided forever.

If the only choices are "my data gets deleted", or "$1,000 dollar bill", I think most students would choose data deleted.

And the whole "we are nice, we will waive bills for beginners who make mistakes" is in my experience, as a computing professor who has had multiple students hit this, not true. They seem to do waive fairly randomly to my eye, about a third of the time.

None of those things need to happen. (Unless you get billed by the individual DNS query?) The cost of storing things that already exist is known perfectly in advance. It is trivial to include the cost of "maintain everything until the end of the month" in your estimate of how much the customer has already spent. Then, when the spending halt occurs, nothing needs to be deleted because that was already accounted for.