AWS cost management: Expert tips to avoid AWS charges

Want to use AWS? That’s great! Unfortunately, as amazing as AWS is, the platform’s billing can be difficult and confusing for a majority of people. In this article, I’m going to explain how to make sure you can go about mastering AWS safely without incurring additional and frightening charges.

Foreword: July 2025 changes to AWS’s free tier offering

As of July 15th, 2025, AWS revamped its free tier structure for brand new accounts. So, if you’re using an older account that predates this, make sure you do some additional research. In this article, we’ll be covering the most updated version of the free tier offering.

What does the AWS free tier include?

When you set up a new AWS account, you can choose the free tier as a six-month trial option. It’s backed by $100 in credits, and you can gain an additional $100 by completing various tasks in the platform, which I’ll cover later.

This free account plan automatically expires after either six months or your credits run out, whichever comes first. If you want to keep going after this period, you have to upgrade to a paid account plan, and then really make sure you’re monitoring your usage.

That said, always free services like AWS Lambda are still available. They still have strict monthly usage limits, so once again, you’ll want to make sure you’re watching your usage appropriately.

How to set up a AWS free-tier account

• Visit AWS.amazon.com/free/
• Click Create a free account

• Enter your root user email and AWS account name
• Click Verify email
• Check your email for the code. Enter it into the Verification Code field, then click Verify
• Enter your root user password twice to confirm it, then click Continue

• Under Choose your account plan, select Choose free plan

• Continue through the process, entering your contact and billing information to finish. Just a note that the phone number listed on this account must be new to AWS. If it was used for another account, you may not qualify for the free account status.

Congratulations! You’ve successfully made a free-tier account.

Note that you’re still limited on what you can do. For example, if you were to load up EC2, you can’t choose to spin up every instance type (Shown below). Even though you’ve got $100 in credits, there’s restrictions on how you can spend them.

How to check the credits you have left on your free-tier account

Now that you’ve created an account, enter the console. This is what you should see by default.

From here, you can scroll down and see how many credits you have left and the days remaining on your free trial.

How to earn free AWS credits

If you’re a new AWS customer, you can earn up to $100 USD worth of AWS credits by completing five different activities, each of which gives you a $20 reward. As of the time of writing, these activities are:

• Launching an instance using EC2

• Using a foundational model in Amazon Bedrock

• Creating a web app using AWS Lambda

• Creating an Amazon RDS database

• Setting up a cost budget using AWS Budgets

You can track your progress towards these goals by going to the dashboard and scrolling down to the “Explore AWS” section, and you can also check out AWS’s dedicated explanation page.

If you want to learn how to do all of the above, Pluralsight offers a wide range of AWS cloud courses that cover everything from AWS fundamentals all the way to expert tasks. This article also covers one of these activities, setting up a cost budget, so you can earn $20 USD in credits right now by following the steps below.

How to set up budget alerts to avoid AWS charges

Eventually, your AWS free-tier account is going to run out. To avoid nasty bills if you decide to upgrade, you’ll want to set up budget alerts using AWS Budgets. It’s also a good idea to do this even if you’re still on the free-tier account, because as mentioned above, it nets you $20 USD extra credits to experiment with. 

• First, go to Billing and Cost Management. You can type in “Budgets” into the search bar to get there quickly.

• In the left side bar, scroll down and click on Budgets under Budgets and Planning

• Click Create a budget

• For Budget Setup, make sure Use a template (Simplified) is selected. For Templates, we want Zero spend budget. This will notify us if spending exceeds $0.01.

• Enter a budget name

• Put in your email recipients

• Click Create budget

Congratulations, you’ve created a budget! You now get an email when you spend a single cent or more. You should also now get $20 USD in AWS credits for completing one of the Explore AWS tasks, if you haven’t already.

How to use all of AWS’s features safely and with less restrictions

As mentioned above, AWS’s free-tier account means we don’t incur AWS charges, but we’re heavily limited in what we can actually experiment with. Meanwhile, having a paid account allows us to make what we want, but there’s always a risk of incurring hefty charges even with alerts. But there is a better solution: cloud sandbox environments.

Cloud sandbox environments are a convenient way to get hands-on practice in not just AWS, but also Azure or Google Cloud. They’re secure-virtual spaces where you can experiment, practice, and learn in a low-pressure setting, without installing anything or cluttering your local environment. Best of all, when using a sandbox, you don’t incur a single AWS charge, so you don’t need to worry about setting up alerts.

There are other kinds of sandboxes (coding, AI, and security) but for the purposes of this article, we’ll only talk about cloud sandboxes. 

How to set up a cloud sandbox to experiment in AWS

For the purposes of this article, we’ll go through how to use Pluralsight to create a cloud sandbox. Note that while we’re talking about AWS here, using the steps below you can also spin up a sandbox for Azure or GCP if you want (and become that multi-cloud unicorn that businesses love.) 

Upfront, accessing Cloud Sandboxes does require a Cloud+ or Complete subscription. The former is $24.50 USD a month if you pay yearly, or $35 on a monthly basis. But this is a once-off cost, and compared to being slapped with an accidental AWS bill for thousands or tens of thousands of dollars, it’s peanuts (and honestly, it’s even better if you just get your work to just pay for it, if you’re employed in a role where upskilling in AWS is essential.) 

Of course, you’re paying for more than the cloud sandboxes at that price. You also get access to thousands of cloud and certification courses, skill assessment tools, and hands-on labs—all of which are useful for the ultimate goal here, which is learning how to make the most of AWS.

I’d suggest going with Cloud+ on a monthly basis since that’s the cheaper option with the lowest upfront cost, then deciding whether or not it’s for you when your month is about to run out. You can check out more details on pricing here. 

• Once you’re subscribed, log in to the Pluralsight platform. If you’re not in it by default, navigate to the Skills platform section using the top left-hand corner.

• Click Hands-on in the left hand menu. 

Note that this section includes hands-on playgrounds and hands-on labs. The latter are guided experiences by experts who walk you through particular tasks, while playgrounds are what sandboxes are under—free-form experiences where we can make (and break) what we want in AWS.

• Under Hands-on Playground and beneath Cloud Sandboxes, click Get Started.

• Under AWS Sandbox, click Open Sandbox. Note that if you wanted to make an Azure or Google Cloud Sandbox, you’d just click one of these at this step instead.

• Click Start Sandbox (Don’t worry about the fields below just yet.)

Congratulations! You’ve now created a brand new, isolated sandbox environment.

All the fields should be auto-populated now. Now, let’s enter the sandbox itself.

• You can enter the sandbox in a few ways, like clicking the Open Sandbox button, or copying the Sandbox URL and pasting it into an incognito window. However, the way I recommend is to just right click the Open Sandbox button and clicking Open Link in Incognito Window.

• The new page should appear with the AWS sign in screen. The Account ID will already be populated.

• Add the username and Password by going back to the previous tab, clicking the copy button next to the respective fields, and entering them into the IAM user sign in form.

• Click sign in.

You’re now inside your isolated cloud sandbox environment! We can now experiment with AWS, and do everything that can be done with a free-tier plan plus a lot more. Now, the sandbox isn’t limitless—no learning sandbox is, given the sheer scale of what you can do with AWS—but you do have a lot more options, and there’s no risk of additional charges.

For example, remember when we went to set up an EC2 instance earlier on the free plan, and couldn’t set up a t2.small or larger? If you go to launch an instance now, you can now do that and more, which is much more representative of a real-world environment (and by extension, better for developing practical skills that translate better to the workplace.)

Once you’re done, go back to your original page and click Delete Sandbox. Don’t stress if you forget to do this, as the sandbox will automatically shut down and be cleaned after a while.  Unlike a real AWS account, you won’t be caught out with a bill for forgetting to shut down something.

Conclusion

The moral of the story here is that you should not be afraid of using AWS. The free plan offering and the credits that they give you are a great way to explore, experiment, and grow your skills. And, if you decide to upgrade to a paid plan afterwards, just make sure to actually set up budgets, monitor your usage, and clean up any unused resources.

Or, you can just leverage Pluralsight’s hands-on playground, and not worry about any of that within the cloud sandboxes that they offer, and you can go ahead and explore, break, and fix things without any additional AWS charges.