AWS Free Tier in 2026: What's Actually Free (and What Quietly Suspends Your Account)

Originally published at unifiedpathmedia.com.

The short version: New AWS accounts no longer get “12 months free.” Since July 2025 they get credits instead: $100 at sign-up and up to $100 more for trying key services. On the Free plan, the account ends after six months or when the credits run out, whichever comes first, and AWS suspends it. You then have 90 days to upgrade before it’s erased. This post covers what’s free, what isn’t, the Organizations trap that costs you credits, and the second sign-up path AWS recently started rolling out.

Published October 8, 2026.

← Part of the AWS Foundations series

Last verified October 22, 2026 against AWS’s Free Tier page, Free Tier FAQs, Free Tier terms, and AWS billing and EC2 documentation. AWS changes this program often, so confirm the current terms at aws.amazon.com/free before you sign up.

Who this is for: anyone about to open an AWS account, or who opened one after July 15, 2025 and wants to know what’s free. You’ll need first: nothing.

Seeing “Accounts with the free plan are not eligible to purchase paid offers”? Jump to what it means and how to get past it.

Search for the AWS Free Tier and you’ll find plenty of advice that was correct in 2024: twelve months free, stick to the small instance types, relax. It’s all still out there. It just doesn’t describe the account you’d open today.

What changed (and when)

• July 15, 2025. Accounts created before this date stay on the legacy Free Tier (12 months of free usage, always-free services, short-term trials). Accounts created after it get the credit model below. If your account is older, this post doesn’t apply to you.

• Fall 2026. AWS began rolling out a second sign-up path with a different account structure. It’s a limited release, so you may not see it yet. More on that below.

• One shot per person. If you have, or ever had, an AWS account, you’re not eligible for the Free plan or the credits. Don’t spend yours on a throwaway test account.

How the credits work

When you open a new account you get $100 in credits right away. You can earn up to $100 more by completing activities in the Explore AWS widget on the console home page. That’s up to $200 in credits in total.

• The extra credits come from small hands-on tasks. At launch AWS listed five worth $20 each: EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud), RDS (Relational Database Service), Lambda, Bedrock, and AWS Budgets. AWS can change that list, so check the widget instead of trusting this one.

• You have to finish the activities within six months of opening the account. You can’t earn more once you turn on advanced features or join an AWS Organization.

• Yes, one of those activities is setting up a budget, which means AWS will pay you to do the thing Part 1 already told you to do.

• You can follow your balance on the Credits page in the Billing console.

You also don’t always need a payment method to start. AWS says most new customers can sign up without one, though it may ask for one to verify your identity.

Free plan vs. Paid plan

When you sign up, you’re on one of two plans. Both include the credits.

For learning, the Free plan is a good deal for a reason people don’t expect: a hard stop is a feature. If you make a mistake, the worst case is that the account ends. It can’t hand you a surprise bill.

The Paid plan also includes short-term free trials of some paid services, free for a set period or up to a one-time usage limit.

“Accounts with the free plan are not eligible to purchase paid offers”

If you’ve hit this message, nothing is broken. You’re on the Free plan, and that plan is fenced off from anything you’d pay for: paid-only services, Marketplace offers, and promotional credits like AWS Activate. It’s AWS keeping its promise that the Free plan can’t send you a bill.

To get past it, you upgrade to the Paid plan. Your unused credits come with you, and you keep the always-free allowances. Just know that the upgrade is a one-way door; there’s no going back to the Free plan afterward.

The part that surprises people: the account suspends

Here’s what happens when your Free plan ends, according to AWS’s FAQ:

1. AWS suspends the account and everything in it. You lose access to your resources and data.

2. AWS keeps your data for 90 days.

3. If you upgrade to the Paid plan in that window, the account reopens and you get your resources back. If you don’t, the account and its contents are permanently erased.

4. You can’t extend the Free plan past six months.

If you upgrade just to retrieve your data, AWS suggests closing the account once you have it so nothing keeps billing.

Think of the Free plan as a test drive, not a lease. The practical rule: never keep anything on it that you can’t rebuild. That’s the whole argument for Terraform. If your infrastructure is code, a suspended account costs you an afternoon. It’s also why your Terraform state shouldn’t live in an S3 (Simple Storage Service) bucket inside the account that’s about to disappear.

Heads up: AWS words this three ways. Its billing documentation says the account “closes automatically,” its FAQ says AWS suspends it, and its Free Tier terms say you can no longer access it. All three agree on what matters: access ends, and AWS keeps your content for 90 days before deleting it for good. Don’t count on getting anything back after that.

Free, every weekGet the free cloud lessonsA short, plain-English lesson every week. Your first email includes the free AWS Account Day-One Setup Checklist. Unsubscribe anytime.

Always-free: the other free tier

Separate from the credits, 30+ services are always free up to monthly limits, on both plans, with no expiry. Common examples are the first million Lambda requests a month and 25 GB (gigabytes) of DynamoDB storage. AWS lists the full set on its Free Tier page.

If you go past an always-free limit while on the Free plan, your credits cover the overage. Once the credits are gone, you have to upgrade to keep using the account.

Which EC2 sizes count as free

For accounts created on or after July 15, 2025, AWS’s EC2 documentation lists these sizes as Free Tier eligible: t3.micro, t3.small, t4g.micro, t4g.small, c7i-flex.large and m7i-flex.large. Accounts opened before that date get t2.micro and t3.micro. Rather than trust a list, ask AWS directly:

aws ec2 describe-instance-types \ --filters Name=free-tier-eligible,Values=true \ --query "InstanceTypes[*].[InstanceType]" \ --output text | sort 

AWS Part 5 explains the instance families.

Credits don’t change what things cost

Credits pay charges. They don’t remove them. Two charges catch people out:

• Public IPv4 addresses. For accounts on the new credit-based plans, each one costs $0.005 an hour, whether it’s in use or idle. That’s about $3.65 a month per address.

• NAT gateways. In US East (Ohio), a NAT (network address translation) gateway, which lets private servers reach the internet, costs $0.045 an hour plus $0.045 per GB of data it processes. Left running for a month, that’s about $33, plus about $3.65 for its public IPv4 address, before any traffic. A Regional NAT gateway charges that hourly rate for each Availability Zone it spans.

On the Free plan, charges like these drain your credits faster than you’d expect. On the Paid plan, once the credits are gone, they’re just a bill. (Prices as of October 2026; check the Amazon VPC (virtual private cloud) pricing page for your Region.)

The Organizations trap

This one connects directly to Part 4, where we said even solo builders benefit from separate accounts.

AWS’s Free Tier terms are blunt about this: if a Free plan account joins an AWS Organization, it’s upgraded to the Paid plan, and you can no longer use or earn Free Tier credits. The FAQ adds that once you join an Organization or set up an AWS Control Tower landing zone, any credit-earning activities you haven’t finished expire immediately.

Organizations isn’t the only switch. AWS’s billing documentation says a Free plan account also upgrades to the Paid plan automatically if you set up a Control Tower landing zone, join the AWS Partner Network, sign a Professional Services contract or an Enterprise Agreement, buy an AWS Skill Builder Team subscription, or mark the account as HIPAA (US health-data rules) or SEC (US Securities and Exchange Commission) compliant.

This applies to joining or creating an Organization yourself. The new sign-up path (below) sets one up for you automatically, and AWS hasn’t said how that one is treated, so check your Credits page.

Part 4’s advice still stands. The timing matters:

• Finish the credit-earning activities before you create an Organization.

• Learn how Organizations work with diagrams and the MiniStack limits post, which covers what a local lab can and can’t emulate.

• Build your real multi-account setup when you’re ready to move on from the Free plan anyway.

(Multi-account thinking is great advice, and also the fastest way to spend your free credits without buying anything. Sequence it.)

The new sign-up path

AWS recently started rolling out a second way to create an account, and it’s still limited to some customers. AWS’s docs call the two options Sign up for AWS (new) and Sign up for AWS (advanced), and the sign-up page shows a banner explaining the difference.

The new path is built for getting started fast:

• You sign in with a login you already own: Google, GitHub, Apple, or Amazon.

• Resources live in projects. A project contains an AWS account plus sharing settings. Together, your projects form your organization, which AWS manages for you.

• There is no root user, and IAM users and roles you create can only be used programmatically, not to sign in to the console.

• AWS picks your Region based on your contact information, and you can’t choose it.

• On the Paid plan you can set a spend limit per project, starting at $20 a month. When a project hits its limit, AWS pauses it and stops its resources until next month.

The advanced path is the classic flow: a root user, IAM, and full control over configuration. AWS’s docs say to use it for regulated workloads, fine-grained permissions, or access to the full set of services. You can activate advanced features on a new-path account later, but you can’t go back to the Free plan once you do.

What this means for the series. Part 1 (root hygiene) and Part 2 (IAM) describe the advanced path. If you want to follow them click for click, choose the advanced option when AWS offers the choice. The new path is a fast way to build, but it hides the things we’re teaching: the root user, IAM, and Organizations.

One open question AWS’s docs don’t answer: the new path automatically sets up an Organization behind the scenes, and AWS doesn’t say whether that affects your credits the way a manually created one does. Check the Credits page and FAQ rather than assuming.

A setup that keeps you safe

1. Choose the Free plan while you’re learning. You can upgrade later, but you can’t downgrade.

2. Write down the day you opened the account and set a reminder for month five.

3. Set a budget alert anyway (Part 1). It’s cheap and it earns an activity credit.

4. Iterate locally, spend credits on the final pass. Do your trial and error in MiniStack, then run the finished Terraform against real AWS once.

5. Keep everything in code. Then the month-six decision (upgrade, or tear down) is easy either way.

6. Skip the Organizations setup until you’ve collected your credits.

Quick answers

Can I downgrade from the Paid plan back to the Free plan?

No. Once an account is on the Paid plan, or has advanced features turned on, it stays there. If you want the Free plan again, it has to be a brand-new account, and AWS only gives Free plan credits to people who’ve never had an AWS account.

Do I need a credit card to sign up?

Usually not. AWS says most new customers can sign up without a payment method, though it may ask for one to verify your identity.

What happens to my stuff when the Free plan ends?

The account is suspended and you lose access, but AWS keeps your data for 90 days. Upgrade within that window and it’s all still there. After 90 days, it’s permanently erased.

Do the credits expire?

Yes. AWS’s Free Tier terms say the credits expire 12 months after you open the account. On the Free plan, though, the plan itself ends at six months, or sooner if the credits run out, so in practice you have six months to use them. If you upgrade to the Paid plan, whatever’s left keeps applying to your bills until that 12-month mark. The credit-earning activities have to be finished within six months. AWS’s FAQ gives both six and twelve months in different answers, so check the expiry date on your Credits page.

Is the always-free tier still free after six months?

On the Paid plan, yes, with no end date. On the Free plan, the whole account stops at six months, always-free services included.

Common mistakes

• Following a 2024 guide. “12 months free” and “stick to t2.micro” describe the legacy program. Check when your account was created first.

• Joining an Organization too early. It moves the account to the Paid plan and ends your credits.

• Forgetting the six-month date. The Free plan ends on its own, and after 90 days the account and its contents are gone.

• Keeping the only copy of your work in the account. Keep it in code, somewhere else, and treat the account as disposable.

• Assuming “free” means “can’t cost anything.” On the Paid plan, anything beyond your credits is billed normally. Set a budget alert first; Part 1 shows how.

Where MiniStack fits

Six months of credits is a short runway, and it burns fastest during trial and error. That’s exactly the work MiniStack is built to absorb for free. Use real AWS for the parts a local lab can’t do, and keep your credits for those.

Related: FinOps Part 1: Set a Spending Alarm Before the Bill Surprises You sets up a budget alert, so a Free Tier mistake shows up before the bill does.

Next: Cloud Architecture Part 1: What Cloud Architecture Actually Means

← Back to the AWS Foundations series

I write a free, plain-English cloud lesson every week at Unified Path Media, plus free browser tools like the AWS VPC & Subnet Planner.