Why It's Great
AWS is the industry leader in cloud computing. Its free tier is split into "Always Free" and "12 Months Free," allowing developers to build and scale serious applications without cost initially.
Key Free Tier Features
๐ป Compute
- EC2: 750 hours/month of t2.micro or t3.micro instances (12 months).
- Lambda: 1 million free requests/month & 3.2M seconds of compute time (Always Free).
- Elastic Load Balancing: 750 hours/month (12 months).
๐๏ธ Storage & Database
- S3: 5GB standard storage (12 months).
- DynamoDB: 25GB NoSQL DB storage (Always Free).
- RDS: 750 hours/month of db.t2.micro, db.t3.micro, or db.t4g.micro (12 months).
๐ง Utilities
- CloudFront: 1TB data transfer out per month.
- SNS/SQS: 1 million requests/month each.
- CodeBuild: 100 build minutes/month.
Limitations
- EC2 and RDS free tiers expire after 12 months.
- Watch out for egress costs if you exceed the free allowances.