How the AWS Free Tier works now
Want guided labs on a real account instead of guessing? The AWS Cloud course at Cokonet Academy runs every lab with a trainer, aligned to the Solutions Architect Associate exam.
Quick answer: Since 15 July 2025, new AWS customers choose a free plan or a paid plan. The free plan gives credits to spend on most services for six months, then the account closes unless you upgrade. Accounts opened before that date stay on the older 12-month free tier until it expires.
The free plan is built for learning. You cannot be charged beyond your credits while you stay on it, which removes the old fear of a bill from a forgotten instance. A few expensive services are blocked on the free plan, and some limits apply to instance sizes. When the six months end or the credits are used, you either upgrade to a paid plan or lose access to the resources.
Always-free offers sit alongside the credits and never expire. They are small monthly allowances on specific services, enough for a serverless project to run for months at zero cost. Limits change, so check the official AWS Free Tier page the day you sign up.
Always-free AWS services worth knowing
Quick answer: The always-free list covers serverless and messaging services: Lambda, DynamoDB, SNS, SQS, CloudWatch basics and a few others. They are ideal for practice because a small project rarely leaves the free allowance.
| Service | Monthly always-free allowance (check current terms) | What to practise |
|---|
| AWS Lambda | 1 million requests and 400,000 GB-seconds of compute | Functions triggered by S3 uploads or API calls |
| Amazon DynamoDB | 25 GB of storage with provisioned capacity | A NoSQL table behind a small API |
| Amazon SNS | 1 million publishes | Email alerts from a CloudWatch alarm |
| Amazon SQS | 1 million requests | Queues between two Lambda functions |
| Amazon CloudWatch | Basic metrics, 10 custom metrics and 10 alarms | Alarms and dashboards for your labs |
Services such as EC2, RDS and NAT gateways are not always free. Practise them with your credits and switch them off when you finish.
AWS training labs you can do on the free plan
Quick answer: Start with IAM, then S3, EC2 and VPC, then Lambda and DynamoDB, then RDS and CloudWatch. That order follows the Solutions Architect Associate syllabus and keeps costs low.
- IAM basics: create a user with MFA, a group with least-privilege permissions and a role for EC2. Never practise as the root user.
- S3 static website: host a portfolio page from a bucket, then add versioning and a lifecycle rule.
- EC2 and security groups: launch a small instance, connect with Session Manager, install a web server and stop it afterwards.
- Custom VPC: build public and private subnets, a route table and an internet gateway. Skip the NAT gateway or delete it quickly, because it bills by the hour.
- Serverless API: API Gateway, Lambda and DynamoDB for a simple to-do list app.
- RDS: a small MySQL instance in a private subnet, connected from EC2, then deleted with a final snapshot.
- Monitoring: a CloudWatch alarm that emails you through SNS when CPU crosses a threshold.
Every one of these maps to an exam domain, and together they make a portfolio. Our guide to AWS services for beginners explains each service in plain English.
How to avoid a surprise AWS bill
Quick answer: Stay on the free plan while you learn, set an AWS Budget alert at a small amount, tag every lab resource and delete what you created at the end of each session. Elastic IPs, NAT gateways and idle RDS instances cause most surprise bills.
- Create a monthly budget with an email alert at 50 and 80 percent of a small figure, even on the free plan.
- Turn on MFA for the root user and lock its access keys away.
- Use one region, such as Mumbai (ap-south-1), so nothing hides in another region.
- Check the Billing dashboard and the Free Tier usage page once a week.
- Delete stacks with CloudFormation instead of clicking resources away one by one.
Most learners in our Trivandrum and Kochi batches spend nothing on the free plan when they follow these five habits.
Free tier vs a guided AWS training course
Quick answer: The free tier gives you a sandbox. It does not give you a syllabus, troubleshooting practice or someone to review your architecture. Self-study works if you are disciplined; structured AWS training is faster if you want a job or a certification on a deadline.
The gap most self-learners hit is troubleshooting. Labs work when you follow a tutorial, but interviews ask what you do when an instance cannot reach the internet or Lambda throws an access denied error. Breaking and fixing environments is where a trainer saves weeks. You can compare every programme we run on our all courses page, or start from the Cokonet Academy homepage.
Not sure whether to self-study or join a batch? Book a free consultation or call +91 8075 400 500 and a counsellor will map a plan to your background.
AWS certification for beginners: where the free tier fits
Quick answer: Use the free plan to practise for AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C02) and then the Solutions Architect Associate (SAA-C03). The credits cover the hands-on labs both exams expect; the exam fees are paid to AWS separately.
Cloud Practitioner tests concepts, pricing and the shared responsibility model, so a few weeks of labs is enough. The Solutions Architect Associate tests design decisions: high availability, VPC design, storage classes and cost optimisation. Our AWS certification path for beginners lays out the order, and the Cloud Practitioner exam guide covers the first step.
AWS jobs in Kerala that value free-tier projects
Quick answer: Cloud support associate, junior cloud engineer and DevOps trainee roles at Technopark, Infopark and remote teams ask for proof you have built on AWS. Free-tier projects in a GitHub repo with an architecture diagram give you that proof.
Recruiters in Kochi and Trivandrum read a project section before the certificate section. Three clean projects, a static site with CloudFront, a serverless API and a three-tier VPC app, each with a diagram and a short write-up, carry more weight than a long list of services. Public job portals put fresher cloud roles in Kerala at roughly Rs 3 to 5 lakh a year, rising with certification and experience. Our guide to AWS jobs in Kochi for freshers lists the employers and roles.
Why Cokonet Academy for AWS training
Cokonet Academy is an NSDC partner training institute with campuses in Trivandrum and Kochi. Find us on Google: Cokonet Academy, Trivandrum and Cokonet Academy, Kochi.
- NSDC partner training institute with campuses in Trivandrum and Kochi, plus a Bengaluru centre and online-live batches
- 11,200+ successful placements and 50+ corporate hiring partners
- Expert trainers in SAP (FICO, MM, ABAP), AWS, Python with AI, Data Analytics and Power BI
- Placement support until you are hired, with mock interviews and resume reviews
The AWS Cloud Architect Program at Cokonet is mapped to the NSDC qualification SSC/Q8304 at NSQF Level 6 and prepares learners for the AWS Solutions Architect Associate path, with labs on live AWS accounts.
Course details
- Course: AWS Cloud Architect Program, Cokonet Academy
- Duration: 80 to 85 hours over about 4.5 months, 5 modules, 3 architecture projects
- Mode: classroom in Trivandrum, Kochi and Bengaluru, or online-live across Kerala and the Gulf; weekday evenings or weekends; English with Malayalam support
- Covers: IAM and account structure, VPC, EC2, S3, RDS, load balancing and Auto Scaling, Route 53 and CloudFront, Lambda and serverless, CloudWatch, CloudFormation, containers overview, Well-Architected Framework and certification prep
- Level: beginner friendly, no coding needed; NSDC SSC/Q8304, NSQF Level 6
- Placement: support until you are hired, with mock interviews and resume reviews
Syllabus, batch dates and trainer profiles: AWS Cloud course in Kerala. If you want CI/CD, Docker, Kubernetes and Terraform as well, see the DevOps on AWS course.
Visit our training centres
Book a free consultation and sit in on a live session before you decide. We are open Monday to Saturday, 9:30am to 10:00pm.
Enrol now
Turn free-tier practice into a job-ready AWS portfolio with trainer-led labs. See the course and next batch, visit Cokonet Academy, or call and WhatsApp +91 8075 400 500.
