What Is the AWS Free Tier?
The AWS Free Tier is a set of always-free, 12-month free, and short-term trial services available to new AWS accounts. It includes 750 hours/month of EC2 t2.micro, 5 GB of S3, 25 GB of DynamoDB, and 1 million Lambda invocations per month — free for the first year.
The AWS Free Tier has three categories:
Always Free (permanent)
- AWS Lambda: 1 million free invocations/month - DynamoDB: 25 GB storage + 200M requests/month - SNS: 1 million published messages/month - CloudWatch: 10 custom metrics + alarms
12-Month Free (expires after 1 year)
- EC2: 750 hours of t2.micro or t3.micro per month - S3: 5 GB storage + 20,000 GET requests - RDS: 750 hours db.t2.micro + 20 GB storage - CloudFront: 50 GB data transfer out
Short-Term Trials (time-limited)
- Amazon Redshift: 2 months free trial - Amazon SageMaker: 2 months free tier - Various other services with 30–60 day trials
How Purchased Free Trial Accounts Differ
An AWS Free Trial account purchased from Cloud Accounts ($15) provides the same free tier access as creating your own AWS account — but it arrives pre-verified with established account health, meaning no credit card required from you and no initial verification delays. Useful when you need a clean, separate account for a project without using your personal AWS identity.
Buying cloud credits from Cloud Accounts is typically 60–80% cheaper than retail rates from AWS, GCP, or Azure. For immediate access without application processes or waiting periods, it's the fastest path to cloud infrastructure.
Also Asked
When creating your own AWS account, yes — a credit card is required for identity verification even if you stay within free tier limits. A purchased account from Cloud Accounts does not require your personal credit card.