Everything You Can Build
for Free on AWS
Amazon Web Services offers a surprisingly generous free tier — enough to launch real products, run side projects, and learn cloud architecture without spending a cent. Here’s how to make the most of it.
Amazon Web Services launched its free tier back in 2010, and what began as a modest onboarding gesture has quietly grown into one of the most powerful no-cost cloud platforms available to any developer, startup founder, or curious tinkerer on the planet. Today, the AWS Free Tier spans more than 100 services, and if you understand exactly what’s included — and what isn’t — you can architect surprisingly sophisticated systems without paying AWS a single dollar.
This guide breaks down the three types of free offerings, highlights the most valuable services, walks you through real projects you can build today, and shares the pro tips that keep your bill at zero.
The Three Types of Free
Not all free-tier services work the same way. AWS divides its free offerings into three distinct categories, each with different rules and time horizons. Understanding this is the single most important thing you can do before you start building.
Always Free
Never expires. Available to all AWS customers forever, regardless of account age.
12-Month Free
Available for 12 months from your account creation date. After that, standard rates apply.
Free Trials
Short-term trials that begin when you first use a service. Duration varies from 30 to 90 days.
The strategic implication is clear: if you’re building something meant to run indefinitely for free, you need to rely on Always Free services as your backbone. The 12-month services are perfect for prototyping, learning, and getting your first product launched — but plan for the transition before month 13 arrives.
Compute: EC2, Lambda & Beyond
Compute Services
3 services| Service | Free Allowance | Type | Best For |
|---|---|---|---|
| EC2 | 750 hrs/mo | 12-month | t2.micro / t3.micro. Run one instance 24/7 continuously for a full year. |
| AWS Lambda | 1M requests/mo | Always Free | Plus 400,000 GB-seconds of compute time per month. The killer free service. |
| AWS Fargate | Spot pricing | Trial | Serverless containers — no EC2 management needed. Good for containerized microservices. |
Lambda is where the real magic happens. One million free requests per month is enough to handle a meaningfully busy API — think tens of thousands of active users at moderate usage levels. Pair Lambda with API Gateway (also free-tier eligible) and you have a fully serverless backend that costs nothing until you hit serious traffic.
EC2: One Always-On Server
The 750 free EC2 hours per month is exactly enough to run one t2.micro or t3.micro instance around the clock, every day, for 12 months. These aren’t powerhouses — 1 vCPU, 1 GB RAM — but they’re perfectly capable of running a personal website, a small API, a Node.js app, or a hobby project with a manageable user base. After 12 months, either migrate to Lambda or be prepared to pay around $8–10/month to keep it running.
Storage: S3, RDS & DynamoDB
Storage & Databases
5 services| Service | Free Allowance | Type | Best For |
|---|---|---|---|
| Amazon S3 | 5 GB storage | 12-month | 20,000 GET requests, 2,000 PUT requests per month. Host static sites, images, files. |
| DynamoDB | 25 GB storage | Always Free | 25 read + 25 write capacity units. Enough for most apps with sensible data modelling. |
| Amazon RDS | 750 hrs/mo | 12-month | db.t2.micro/db.t3.micro. MySQL, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, or SQL Server Express. |
| ElastiCache | 750 hrs/mo | 12-month | cache.t2.micro for Redis or Memcached. Add caching to dramatically reduce database load. |
| Amazon EFS | 5 GB storage | 12-month | Elastic File System — shared file storage accessible from multiple EC2 instances. |
DynamoDB is the unsung hero of the AWS Free Tier. Twenty-five gigabytes of storage and 25 read/write capacity units — forever. For most side projects, hobby apps, and even modest production services, that’s more than enough. A well-modelled DynamoDB table can serve millions of reads on those 25 RCUs if you’re not scanning entire tables. Design your access patterns up front, use sparse indexes wisely, and the free tier will carry you surprisingly far.
Networking & Content Delivery
Networking & CDN
4 services| Service | Free Allowance | Type | Best For |
|---|---|---|---|
| Amazon CloudFront | 1 TB data out/mo | Always Free | 10M HTTP/HTTPS requests per month. Global CDN for blazing-fast content delivery. |
| API Gateway | 1M API calls/mo | Always Free | REST API calls free forever. HTTP APIs even more generous. Pair with Lambda. |
| Route 53 | — | Paid | $0.50/hosted zone/month. Not free, but essential and nearly free for personal projects. |
| Amazon VPC | Unlimited | Always Free | The VPC itself is free. NAT Gateways and data transfer costs do apply. |
CloudFront’s always-free allowance deserves special attention: one terabyte of data transfer out per month is enormous. If you host a static site on S3 and serve it through CloudFront, you’re getting a globally distributed, low-latency website with HTTPS, custom domains, and a generous bandwidth allocation — for nothing. This is the recommended architecture for any portfolio site, marketing page, or documentation site.
Developer Tools & AI Services
Developer & AI Services
6 services| Service | Free Allowance | Type | Best For |
|---|---|---|---|
| Amazon SES | 62,000 emails/mo | Always Free | When sending from an EC2 instance. Transactional email for apps and notifications. |
| Amazon SNS | 1M publishes/mo | Always Free | Notifications, fan-out messaging, mobile push. 1,000 email notifications free. |
| Amazon SQS | 1M requests/mo | Always Free | Decoupled message queuing. Build resilient async systems without managing infrastructure. |
| Amazon Rekognition | 5,000 images/mo | 12-month | Object detection, facial analysis, content moderation via API. |
| Amazon Polly | 5M characters/mo | 12-month | Text-to-speech. 5 million characters is roughly 50+ hours of audio generation. |
| AWS CodeBuild | 100 build mins/mo | Always Free | CI/CD build time. Enough for a small team running light pipelines. |
Real Projects You Can Build
The services above aren’t just a list of features — they combine into real, production-capable architectures. Here are some projects you can build and run completely within the free tier:
Free-Tier Project Ideas
- A full-stack serverless web app (React + API Gateway + Lambda + DynamoDB)
- A static portfolio or marketing site hosted on S3 + CloudFront with a custom domain
- A URL shortener with DynamoDB as the key-value store and Lambda handling redirects
- A personal finance tracker with a React frontend, Lambda API, and RDS PostgreSQL database
- A serverless image processor that resizes uploads via S3 triggers and Lambda
- An email notification service using SES for transactional mail and SQS for queuing
- A simple e-commerce backend with product listings in DynamoDB and checkout via Lambda
- A REST API for a mobile app using API Gateway, Lambda, and Cognito for auth
- A real-time chat app using API Gateway WebSockets and DynamoDB for message storage
- A CI/CD pipeline using CodeBuild, CodePipeline, and S3 for artifact storage
6 Tips to Stay Free Forever
The biggest reason developers get surprise AWS bills isn’t misunderstanding the free tier — it’s making small architectural mistakes or forgetting to clean up resources. These tips will keep your bill at zero.
- Set up a billing alert the moment you create your account. Go to AWS Budgets and create a zero-dollar threshold alert. You’ll get an email before you’re charged anything.
- Always Free services are your foundation. Lambda, DynamoDB, CloudFront, API Gateway, SQS, SNS — design your architecture around these and you can run indefinitely at no cost.
- Don’t leave EC2 instances running if you’re not using them. The free 750 hours runs out fast if you accidentally spin up multiple instances.
- Watch your data transfer costs. Inbound data is almost always free, but outbound data transfer can cost money even when the service itself is in the free tier. CloudFront’s 1TB allowance mitigates this significantly.
- Use the AWS Cost Explorer and Cost Allocation Tags to monitor exactly which services and resources are consuming your free tier. Knowledge is protection.
- Delete unused Elastic IP addresses. Unattached EIPs cost $0.005/hour — not much, but entirely avoidable and a common source of mystery charges.
Knowing the Limits
The AWS Free Tier is genuinely generous, but it’s not unlimited. Lambda’s 1 million requests per month sounds like a lot, but a popular API can burn through that in days. DynamoDB’s 25 read/write capacity units will bottleneck if you’re running unoptimized queries or full table scans. EC2’s t2.micro has burstable CPU — great for light workloads, brutal for sustained computational tasks.
The right mindset is not “can this survive on the free tier?” but rather “how do I design this so it thrives on the free tier?” That means event-driven architectures over polling, sparse DynamoDB reads over full scans, CloudFront caching over origin server hits. These are also, not coincidentally, best practices for scalable production systems. The free tier teaches good habits.
The Verdict
The AWS Free Tier in 2026 is a legitimate platform for serious projects. With Lambda, DynamoDB, CloudFront, API Gateway, SQS, SNS, and SES all free forever, you have the backbone of a production-grade, serverless architecture at no cost. Layer in the 12-month services — EC2, S3, RDS, ElastiCache — and your first year of building on AWS can be entirely free.
The developers and founders who understand this deeply don’t just save money — they move faster. They prototype on the free tier, validate ideas before committing budget, and build the discipline of cost-aware architecture that serves them well when the bill finally does come.
Start building. Your first AWS invoice can — and should — read $0.00.
