AWS Free Tier Changes on July 15, 2025

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".

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.

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.