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".
Animats · 2h ago
No more running on free tier forever. "6-month maximum duration".
bigstrat2003 · 10m ago
But you never could? The free tier has always ended after 12 months.
paulryanrogers · 1h 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.
wiether · 41m ago
You'll probably reach Localstack's free-tier's limits sooner than the ones of an AWS Free Plan.
vivzkestrel · 2h ago
looks like an attempt by them to stop gaming the system
charcircuit · 1h ago
If AWS could lower their bandwidth prices by 99% it would revolutionize the internet.
reactordev · 2h 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 · 1h 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 · 23m ago
Didn’t oracle cloud offer something like that free forever?
Volundr · 2m ago
Oracle clouds free offerings are very generous. But then your using Oracle.
lazystar · 1h 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 · 1h ago
GCP manages to do it, AWS are just greedy and bad at DX
dsign · 1h 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 · 59m 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.
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".
Ah well, there's always LocalStack for test environments.
1 t4, 1 Aurora, 10GB bucket, and a dream…
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.
i could see a $10/month sub being a thing, but free forever... cmon, you know ppl would abuse the hell outta that.
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?