AWS Free Tier

Free Tier allows using certain services without incurring costs for the specified period. There are 3 types of offers available:

  • Always free: does not expire and available to all customers.
    • Example: Lambda allows 1 million free requests and up to 3.2 million seconds of compute time per month.
  • 12 months free: free for 12 months following initial sign-up date to AWS.
    • Example: specific amounts of S3 standard storage.
  • Trials: free for a period after activating a service.
    • Example: Inspector offers 90-day free trial.

AWS Pricing Concepts

How AWS Pricing Works

AWS offers pay-as-you-go pricing with various concepts:

  • Pay for what you use: pay for exactly the amount of resources we actually use, with no long-term contracts or complex licensing.
  • Pay less when you reserve: some services offer reservation options that provide a significant discount compared to On-Demand Instance pricing.
  • Pay less with volume-based discounts when you use more: some services offer tiered pricing, so the per-unit cost is incrementally lower with increased usage.

AWS Pricing Calculator

Pricing Calculator lets us explore AWS services and create an estimate for the cost of different use cases.

We can organise AWS estimates by groups. A group can reflect how our company is organised, such as providing estimates by cost center.

Blling & Cost Management Dashboard

The Billing & Cost Management dashboard allows us to:

  • Pay our AWS bills.
  • Monitor our usage.
  • Analyse and control our costs.

Consolidated Billing

Consolidated Billing allows us to centralise the billing and payment for multiple AWS accounts.

A benefit of consolidated billing is the ability to share bulk discount pricing, Savings Plans, and Reserved Instances across the accounts in our organisation.

AWS Budgets

AWS Budgets allows us to set cost and usage thresholds, monitor spending patterns, and recieve alerts to effectively manage and control AWS expenses.

AWS Cost Explorer

AWS Cost Explorer provides a detailed analysis and visualisation of AWS usage and costs, enabling us to gain insights, optimise spending, and make informed decisions about our AWS resources.

AWS Support Plans

AWS offers four different Support Plans to help troubleshoot issues, lower costs and efficiently use AWS services:

  • Basic Support (free): provides access to customer service and resoucres for general account and billing inquiries, along with limited technical support, to assist users with their AWS architecture.
  • Developer Support: offers technical guidance and assistance to developers for their specific development and code-level inquiries, helping them optimise and troubleshoot their applications on AWS.
  • Enterprise On-Ramp: provides specialised assistance and resources to enterprise customers during the migration and onboarding process, ensuring a smoth transition to AWS.
  • Enterprise: offers comprehensive technical support, guidance, and proactive assistance to enterprise customers, empowering them to optimise their AWS architecture, enhance performance, and effectively manage their workloads at scale.

Technical Account Manager (TAM)

The TAM is the primary point of contact at AWS. TAMs are responsible for:

  • Educating, empowering and evolving our cloud journey.
  • Provide expert engineering guidance.
  • Help us design solutions that efficiently integrate services.
  • Assist with cost-effective and resilient architectures.
  • Provide direct access to AWS programs and a broad community of experts.

Both enterprise support plans include access to a TAM.

AWS Marketplace

AWS Marketplace is a digital catalog that includes software listings from independent software vendors. We can use AWS Marketplace to find, test and buy software on AWS.