Pricing & billing

The AWS Free Tier provides limited free usage of select services for 12 months after account creation.. The AWS Free Tier gives new customers a set of service limits—such as 750 hours of t2.micro EC2 or 5 GB of S3 storage—that are free for the first 12 months after account creation.

AWS Reserved Instances offer savings when committing to 1 or 3 years of continuous use.. Reserved Instances require a 1‑/ or 3‑year commitment, delivering a discounted hourly rate versus On‑Demand when the instance is continuously used.

The AWS Free Tier is designed to allow new customers to try out AWS services with limited usage caps, such as 750 hours of t2.micro EC2 or 5 GB of S3 storage, for the first 12 months. A diagram for this topic isn't available yet — the worked example below walks the same reasoning step by step.

• !Many people mistakenly believe that the AWS Free Tier offers unlimited free usage or that it applies to all services, which is not the case. The free tier has specific limits and only applies to select services.
• !The incorrect options can be ruled out since occasional use is not suitable for Reserved Instances, per-second billing is a separate pricing model, and spot pricing also has its own pricing mechanism.
• !Some users may confuse AWS Cost Explorer with other AWS services that manage different aspects of their AWS environment, such as IAM for identity management or VPC for network configuration. However, Cost Explorer is focused solely on cost analysis and visualization.
• !They are not suited for occasional or unpredictable workloads, making option A incorrect, and they do not involve per‑second billing or Spot pricing, which are separate pricing models.

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