AWS Pricing & Free Plan Limits
Complete pricing breakdown for AWS including all plans, hidden costs, and limitations.
Pricing score: 40/100
Is AWS free?
Yes — the Free Tier (12 months) plan costs nothing. Paid plans start at $7.49/month (EC2 On-Demand (t3.micro)).
Free plan limits
- Users: N/A
- Storage: 5GB S3, 30GB EBS
- 12-month limit, only specific instance types, basic support only (documentation)
Watch out: Aurora NOT included, Elastic IPs charged when stopped, data egress fees, many services NOT free tier eligible
Plans & Pricing
User limit: N/A
Storage: 5GB S3, 30GB EBS
User limit: N/A
Storage: EBS separate
User limit: N/A
Storage: EBS separate
User limit: Unlimited
Storage: N/A
Pricing Issues Reported by Users
Unpredictable billing with surprise charges
AWS billing is notoriously complex. Users report bills ballooning from $50 to $8,000+ unexpectedly. Common surprises include data egress fees ($0.09/GB), NAT Gateway charges ($0.045/hr + data), CloudWatch log ingestion, and charges for stopped instances with attached EBS. A student received $670 for 30 minutes of database queries.
Free tier traps - Aurora, RDS, and Elastic IP charges
The AWS Free Tier excludes many commonly used services. Users report charges for Aurora (not free tier eligible), Elastic IPs when instances are stopped, RDS backups, and VPC resources. Students and developers experimenting frequently discover $40-1,600+ bills from services they thought were free.
Data egress fees add up quickly
AWS charges $0.09/GB for data leaving the platform (data egress). For applications serving media, APIs, or downloads, these costs compound rapidly. Multi-region architectures face inter-region transfer fees. Some companies report data transfer exceeding their compute costs.
Cost optimization requires dedicated expertise
Managing AWS costs at scale requires dedicated tools and expertise. There are consulting agencies that specialize solely in decoding AWS bills. Reserved Instances, Savings Plans, Spot Instances, and rightsizing require constant attention. Without optimization, bills grow 30-50% beyond necessary.