AWS Review 2026: Free Plan, Spend Limits, Real Costs and the Fine Print

The short verdict

AWS is the most complete cloud you can buy, and in 2026 it finally became safer for beginners. The project spend limit is a real cap, not just an alert, and the Free plan no longer asks most people for a card. That fixes the most common horror story: a forgotten resource quietly billing a personal card.

It is still not the cheapest or simplest place to run one small server. A plain EC2 instance plus its public IPv4 address costs more per month than a comparable Lightsail bundle, and egress beyond the free 100 GB is billed at $0.09 per GB. Paid support now starts at $29 a month per account. If you need managed databases, queues, serverless and global reach under one bill, AWS earns its place. If you need one VPS, Lightsail or a simpler host is the better buy.

• Best for: teams that will use several managed services, need specific Regions or compliance features, or plan to grow.
• Not ideal for: a single small website or side project that only needs one virtual server.
• Biggest 2026 improvement: per-project spend limits from $20 a month that pause the project at the limit.
• Biggest catch: the Free plan account closes after 6 months or when credits run out, whichever comes first.

What changed in 2026: projects, spend limits and no card

AWS announced the new AWS Builder Experience on September 16, 2026. You can sign up with Google, GitHub, Apple or Amazon credentials as well as email. According to the announcement, most new customers need no credit card and get up to $200 in Free Tier credits.

Billing is now organized by project. Each project has its own spend limit and its own team members, and you can create more projects with one click. AWS also added a one-prompt setup that connects a coding agent by installing the AWS CLI and the Agent Toolkit for AWS.

Accounts that need more can turn on what AWS calls advanced features, such as multiple Regions and custom governance controls, without migration or downtime and at no additional cost. That switch is one-way: once advanced features are on, you cannot go back to the Free plan and cannot earn more activity credits.

The Free plan: up to $200 in credits and a six-month clock

Since July 2025, new AWS customers choose between a Free plan and a Paid plan. You get $100 in credits on sign-up and can earn up to $100 more by completing activities. In the 2025 version there were five activities worth $20 each: launch an EC2 instance, try the Amazon Bedrock playground, set up a cost budget, build a Lambda web app and create an RDS database. Usage during those activities is itself charged against your credits, so the $200 is a ceiling, not a guaranteed balance.

The Free plan expires 6 months after sign-up or when the credits are used up, whichever comes first. AWS's documentation says the account then closes automatically and you lose access to your resources and data. The FAQ describes it as a suspension. Both agree on what happens next: AWS keeps your content for 90 days and then permanently deletes the account. To keep it, you must upgrade to a Paid plan within those 90 days. You cannot extend the Free plan past 6 months, and you cannot move from Paid back to Free.

What the Free plan does not include

• Services that could drain credits, such as Savings Plans, Reserved Instances and some AWS Marketplace offers.
• Other promotional credits and discounts.
• GovCloud (US) and China Regions.
• Some actions upgrade you to Paid automatically: joining AWS Organizations, setting up a Control Tower landing zone, joining the AWS Partner Network, signing an Enterprise Agreement, or marking the account for HIPAA or SEC workloads.

Some offers stay free beyond the credits. Lambda includes 1 million requests and 400,000 GB-seconds a month. DynamoDB includes 25 write capacity units, 25 read capacity units and 25 GB of storage per Region per payer account. CloudFront includes 1 TB of transfer out and 10 million requests a month, and SQS and SNS each include 1 million requests or publishes. CloudWatch includes 10 custom metrics and 10 alarms.

What a small workload really costs

For one always-on server you have two realistic options on AWS: a Lightsail bundle with a fixed monthly price, or an EC2 instance billed per second. Here is how they compare at the low end.

Lightsail bundles (Linux, with a public IPv4 address)

• $5 a month: 0.5 GB RAM, 2 vCPUs, 20 GB SSD, 1 TB transfer.
• $7 a month: 1 GB RAM, 40 GB SSD, 2 TB transfer.
• $12 a month: 2 GB RAM, 60 GB SSD, 3 TB transfer.
• $24 a month: 4 GB RAM.

IPv6-only bundles are cheaper: $3.50 a month for 512 MB RAM, 2 vCPUs, 20 GB and 1 TB, $5 for 1 GB RAM and 40 GB, and $10 for 2 GB RAM. Note that the $5 IPv4 bundle has 0.5 GB of memory while the $5 IPv6-only bundle has 1 GB. You cannot attach a static IP to an IPv6-only instance.

EC2 On-Demand, Linux, US East

• t4g.micro (2 vCPUs, 1 GiB, Arm): $0.0084 an hour, about $6.13 a month.
• t3.micro (2 vCPUs, 1 GiB): $0.0104 an hour, about $7.59 a month.
• t4g.small (2 GiB, Arm): $0.0168 an hour, about $12.26 a month.
• t3.small (2 GiB): $0.0208 an hour, about $15.18 a month.
• m7g.large (2 vCPUs, 8 GiB, Arm): $0.0816 an hour, about $59.57 a month.
• m7i.large (2 vCPUs, 8 GiB): $0.1008 an hour, about $73.58 a month.

The monthly figures are our own arithmetic at 730 hours, from AWS's published hourly rates as of October 8, 2026. EC2 bills per second with a 60-second minimum; SUSE Linux instances are billed by the full hour.

The EC2 hourly price is not the whole bill. A t3.micro with a public IPv4 address costs about $7.59 plus about $3.65 for the address, roughly $11.24 a month before storage and before any egress beyond the free allowance. A $7 Lightsail bundle with the same memory includes the address, 40 GB of SSD and 2 TB of transfer. For a single small server, Lightsail is the better value.

Discounts and who can use them

Compute Savings Plans save up to 66% and EC2 Instance Savings Plans up to 72% against On-Demand. Reserved Instances also reach up to 72%, and Spot Instances up to 90%. Savings Plans and Reserved Instances are not available on the Free plan, and both are commitments: if you close the account, you stay liable for what you committed to.

The costs people miss: data transfer and public IPv4

Data transfer out

Every AWS account gets 100 GB of data transfer out to the internet free each month. That allowance is aggregated across all services and Regions, not given per Region, and excludes China and GovCloud. Beyond it, transfer out costs $0.09 per GB for the first 10 TB a month, $0.085 for the next 40 TB, $0.07 for the next 100 TB, and $0.05 above 150 TB.

In practice, a site that serves 1,000 GB a month straight from EC2 pays for about 900 GB, or roughly $81 at $0.09 per GB by our arithmetic. CloudFront's always-free 1 TB of transfer out changes that math for static content, which is why fronting a site with CloudFront is often the cheapest fix.

Lightsail transfer rules

Lightsail allowances count both inbound and outbound traffic, but only outbound traffic beyond the allowance is billed. Overage is $0.09 per GB in N. Virginia, $0.13 in Mumbai and $0.17 in Sydney. Bundles in Mumbai, Sydney, Jakarta, Malaysia, Hong Kong and São Paulo get half the usual allowance. A Lightsail static IP that is not attached to an instance for more than an hour costs $0.005 an hour.

The public IPv4 charge

Since February 1, 2024, AWS charges $0.005 per hour for every public IPv4 address, whether it is attached to a resource or sitting idle. That is about $3.65 a month per address at 730 hours. Load balancers, NAT gateways and forgotten Elastic IPs each carry addresses, so the charge adds up across a small architecture. Public IP Insights in VPC IP Address Manager lists every public IPv4 address in the account.

Spend limits vs AWS Budgets: what actually stops the bill

For years the standard advice was that AWS has no hard spending cap. That is now out of date for new accounts. On a Paid plan in the new experience, you can set a monthly spend limit per project starting at $20. AWS notifies you at 50%, 75% and 90%, and if the project reaches its limit, AWS pauses the project and stops its resources until the next month unless you raise the limit.

Pausing protects your wallet, not your uptime. A project that hits its limit goes offline, so set the limit with headroom for a production workload. We found no native cap in AWS's documentation for accounts created before the new experience or for accounts with advanced features turned on.

AWS Budgets is an alarm, not a cap

AWS Budgets monitoring and notifications are free. The first two action-enabled budgets are free, then each costs $0.10 a day, and each report delivered costs $0.01. Budget data updates up to three times a day, typically 8 to 12 hours apart, so a runaway resource can bill for most of a day before an alert fires.

Budget actions can apply IAM policies or service control policies, or stop specific EC2 and RDS instances. If an instance belongs to an Auto Scaling group, Auto Scaling starts it again. Cost Anomaly Detection adds machine-learning alerts for unusual spending on top of that.

Support plans after the 2025 shake-up

Every account includes Basic Support for free. On December 2, 2025 AWS stopped selling Developer Support and Business Support, and both are discontinued on January 1, 2027. Developer customers must opt in to Business Support+ or accept a downgrade to Basic. Enterprise On-Ramp also ends on January 1, 2027, and its customers move to Enterprise Support during 2026. The older plans remain available in GovCloud (US).

• Business Support+: the greater of $29 a month per account or 9% of charges up to $10K, 7% from $10K to $80K, 5% from $80K to $250K and 3% above $250K. Under 30 minutes for a business-critical or mission-critical system down, with lower severities answered in under 1, 4, 12 or 24 hours.
• Enterprise Support: the greater of $5,000 a month or 10% up to $150K, 7% from $150K to $500K, 5% from $500K to $1M and 3% above $1M. Under 15 minutes for critical cases. The minimum fell from $15,000.
• Unified Operations: the greater of $50,000 a month or 10% up to $1M, 6% from $1M to $5M and 5% above $5M. Under 5 minutes from an Incident Management Engineer.

Two details matter for small teams. Support fees are calculated on gross charges before discounts or credits, so a bill fully covered by credits can still produce a support fee. And the minimum commitment is 30 days, or 90 days for Unified Operations. On a $500 monthly bill, Business Support+ costs $45 a month by our arithmetic, since 9% beats the $29 floor.

Reliability, the SLA and the October 2025 outage

The EC2 Region-level SLA promises 99.99% monthly uptime for instances deployed at the same time across two or more Availability Zones. Service credits are 10% of the affected charges below 99.99%, 30% below 99.0% and 100% below 95.0%. A single instance has a separate 99.5% instance-level SLA with credits of 10%, 30% and 100% on similar bands, and AWS automatically does not charge for a single instance that is unavailable for more than 6 minutes of a clock hour.

• Credits are service credits against future bills, not cash refunds, and are only issued above $1.
• You must file a claim through a Support Center case by the end of the second billing cycle after the incident.
• Region-level and instance-level claims cannot be stacked for the same incident.
• The compute SLA was last updated on May 25, 2022.

The October 2025 us-east-1 outage

The most serious recent incident with an AWS post-event summary ran from 11:48 PM PDT on October 19 to 2:20 PM PDT on October 20, 2025, about 14.5 hours in US East (N. Virginia). DynamoDB was impaired until 2:40 AM, EC2 instance launches failed from 2:25 AM to 10:36 AM, and Network Load Balancer was affected from 5:30 AM to 2:09 PM. AWS traced the root cause to a latent race condition in DynamoDB's DNS automation that left an empty DNS record for the regional endpoint.

The lesson for small teams is not that AWS is unreliable, but that a single Region is a single point of failure. If your users would notice a day offline, plan for a second Availability Zone at minimum, and treat us-east-1 as the Region most likely to be in the news when something breaks.

Contract and account closure fine print

The AWS Customer Agreement was last updated on August 14, 2026. A few clauses are worth knowing before you put anything important on it.

• AWS can terminate the agreement for any reason with at least 30 days' notice.
• New or increased fees need 30 days' notice; adverse SLA changes need 90 days' notice.
• Billing is monthly, and late payments carry interest of 1.5% per month.
• After termination you have 30 days to retrieve your content, but only if you have paid everything you owe.

Closing an account is a separate process. A closed account can be reopened during a 90-day post-closure period, you receive a final bill the following month, and you remain liable for any outstanding Reserved Instances and Savings Plans. Do not confuse that 90-day window with the 30-day content window under the agreement, or with the 90-day retention after a Free plan expires.

Who AWS fits, and who should pick something simpler

AWS makes sense when you will use what only a large cloud offers: managed databases, queues, serverless functions, AI services such as Bedrock, many Regions, and the compliance programs larger customers ask about. The 2026 project model also suits small agencies and teams, since each client or app can get its own project, members and spend limit.

Pick something simpler if all you need is one virtual server and a database on the same box. Lightsail inside AWS covers that with predictable prices. Outside AWS, flat-priced VPS hosts include more transfer and do not charge for IPv4 by the hour.

• Choose AWS for multi-service apps, growth plans, specific compliance needs or Region coverage.
• Choose Lightsail for a small site, blog or API that fits on one server.
• Choose a different provider if you want flat pricing and generous bandwidth with no add-on charges.

Frequently asked questions

Is AWS free in 2026?

Partly. New customers get $100 in credits plus up to $100 more from activities, but the Free plan ends after 6 months or when the credits run out. Some offers, such as 1 million Lambda requests a month, stay free on a Paid plan.

What happens when my AWS Free plan ends?

The account closes and you lose access to your resources. AWS keeps your content for 90 days, and you can upgrade to a Paid plan within that window to keep the account. After 90 days it is permanently deleted.

Can I set a hard spending limit on AWS?

Yes, on accounts created with the 2026 experience. A Paid plan project can have a monthly spend limit from $20, and AWS pauses the project when it is reached. AWS Budgets on its own only alerts, with data that can lag 8 to 12 hours.

Do I need a credit card to sign up for AWS?

Not for most new customers since the September 2026 launch. AWS says most sign-ups need no payment method, but you will need one to upgrade to a Paid plan.

Is Lightsail cheaper than EC2 for a small website?

Usually, yes. A $7 Lightsail bundle includes 1 GB of RAM, 40 GB of SSD, 2 TB of transfer and a public IPv4 address, while a t3.micro costs about $7.59 a month before storage, plus about $3.65 for its public IPv4 address.

How much does AWS support cost now?

Basic Support is free. Paid support starts with Business Support+ at the greater of $29 a month per account or a percentage of your bill, starting at 9%. Developer Support is no longer sold and ends on January 1, 2027.

Does AWS refund money after an outage?

Not as cash. Eligible SLA breaches earn service credits against future bills, only above $1, and you must file a claim through Support by the end of the second billing cycle after the incident.

Can I cancel AWS at any time?

Yes, you can close the account whenever you like, but you will get a final bill the following month and remain liable for any Reserved Instances or Savings Plans you committed to. A closed account can be reopened within 90 days.

Key takeaways

• New accounts in 2026 get project billing, social sign-in, no card for most customers and up to $200 in credits.
• The Free plan ends after 6 months or when credits run out, and the account closes with 90 days to upgrade.
• Per-project spend limits from $20 a month are a real cap that pauses the project; AWS Budgets is only an alert.
• Lightsail beats a bare EC2 instance for one small server once you add the $0.005 per hour IPv4 charge.
• Egress beyond the account-wide 100 GB free costs $0.09 per GB, the cost most small teams underestimate.
• Developer and Business Support end on January 1, 2027; Business Support+ starts at $29 a month.
• SLA payouts are service credits, not refunds, and must be claimed by the end of the second billing cycle.