Tracking your AWS Free Tier usage

You can track your AWS Free Tier usage in the following ways:

Monitoring free account plan information: You can monitor your free account plan expiration date, credit balance, and days remaining through the AWS Cost and Usage Report widget, AWS Management Console home, or programmatically through the AWS SDK and CLI at no cost. You also receive periodic email alerts regarding your credit balance and when you are approaching the end of your free account plan period.

Monitoring paid account plan information: You can monitor your credit balance and expiration date on the credits page in the AWS Billing and Cost Management console. You can also track your actual usage against short-term trial and always free usage limits using the free tier API or on the Free Tier page on the AWS Billing and Cost Management console. This shows when you exceed the free usage limits and will switch to pay-as-you-go pricing each month.

Using AWS Free Tier usage alerts

You can use AWS Free Tier usage alerts to track and take action on your cost and usage. For more information about this feature, see Managing your costs with AWS Budgets.

AWS Free Tier usage alerts automatically notifies you over email when you exceed 85 percent of your Free Tier limit for each service. For additional tracking, you can configure AWS Budgets to track your usage to 100% of the Free Tier limit by setting a zero spend budget using the template. You can also filter your budget to track individual services.

For example, you can set up a budget to send you an alert when you’re forecasted to exceed 100 percent of the Free Tier limit for Amazon Elastic Block Store. To set up a usage budget, see Creating a usage budget.

AWS Free Tier usage alerts cover AWS services with an active Free Tier offering in the current month, such as the first 25 GB of Amazon DynamoDB storage or the first 10 custom Amazon CloudWatch metrics.

Your AWS Free Tier offerings depend on your plan type. Paid plan accounts might have Short-term trial and Always Free offerings active. If you go beyond the Free Tier free limit for a service or access paid features, your AWS Free Tier credits automatically apply to cover the eligible cost. After your AWS Free Tier credits expire or are fully used, you're charged at the standard AWS billing rates for usage beyond the free limits. Free account plan accounts only have Always Free offerings active.

When you exceed the Free Tier limit for a service, AWS sends an email to the email address that you used to create your account (the AWS account root user). To change the email address for AWS Free Tier usage alerts, see the following procedure:

AWS Budgets usage alerts for 85 percent of the Free Tier limit are automatically activated for all individual AWS accounts, but not for a management account in an AWS Organizations. If you own a management account, you must opt in to get AWS Free Tier usage alerts. Use the following procedure to opt in or out of Free Tier usage alerts.

Recommended actions for Free Tier

If you're eligible for AWS Free Tier and you use a free tier offering, you can track your usage with the Recommended actions widget on the Billing and Cost Management home page. This widget shows recommendations if your usage exceeded 85% of any service's free tier usage limits.

The following conditions might limit whether you see AWS Free Tier data:

For more information, see Recommended actions.

Trackable AWS Free Tier services

With AWS, you can track how much you used AWS Free Tier services and what service usage types you used. Usage types are the specific type of usage that AWS tracks. For example, the usage type BoxUsage:freetier.micro means that you used an Amazon EC2 micro instance.

The AWS Free Tier usage alerts and the Top AWS Free Tier Services by Usage table cover both expiring and non-expiring AWS Free Tier offerings. You can track the following services and usage types.