- Free allowance
- Quoted from the t4g page: 'Free Trial: Try Amazon EC2 t4g.small instances powered by AWS Graviton2 processors free for up to 750 hours / month until Dec 31st 2026.' Quoted from the signup FAQ: 'With Sign up for AWS (new), most new customers will not be required to provide a payment method to get...
- Verdict
- caveatusable, with a named limit or an unprobed read path
- Cost
- free tier
- Identity
- emailno card, no phone
- Binding limit
- retention-clampedthe Free plan ends at 6 months or when the USD 100 to 200 of credits is spent, whichever comes first; the t4g.small free trial itself is advertised until 2026-12-31
- Evidence
- documented11 sources; a first-party page was read and the sentence quoted
- Freshness
- stale on 2026-11-24checked 2026-10-24 (live); stale on 2026-11-24
| Free tier | Quoted from the t4g page: 'Free Trial: Try Amazon EC2 t4g.small instances powered by AWS Graviton2 processors free for up to 750 hours / month until Dec 31st 2026.' Quoted from the signup FAQ: 'With Sign up for AWS (new), most new customers will not be required to provide a payment method to get started.' The Free plan runs 6 months or until the credits are spent: 'Your free account plan ends after six months or when your credits are fully used - whichever occurs first.' unit hours; metered on wall-clock |
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| Price | none stated |
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| Limits | - retention-clamped (binding) the Free plan ends at 6 months or when the USD 100 to 200 of credits is spent, whichever comes first source
- retention-clamped (binding) the t4g.small free trial itself is advertised until 2026-12-31 source
- volume-quota 750 hours a month, so one instance at 24/7 and no second one source
- write-gated a payment method may be requested for additional verification; when it is, USD 1 is held for 3 to 5 days source
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| Binding | retention-clamped Six months is a hard stop with automatic account closure, and the t4g.small trial has its own advertised end date of 2026-12-31, so the machine has two clocks and the earlier one wins. |
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| Identity | email no card for most new customers: quoted 'With Sign up for AWS (new), most new customers will not be required to provide a payment method to get started. In some cases, we may ask for additional verification to protect your account.' When a card is asked for, the hold is USD 1: quoted 'Our verification process holds USD $1 (or equivalent) for 3-5 days to verify your account and help prevent fraud; however, your card will not be charged'. Signup supports 'Google, GitHub, Apple, or Amazon' as the identity provider. |
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| Egress | 'AWS customers receive 100 GB of free data transfer out to the internet free each month, aggregated across all AWS Services and Regions (except China and GovCloud).' The marginal rate beyond 100 GB was not read on a page, so it is not recorded as a number. free allowance: 100 GB per month, aggregated across services |
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| Per-object cap | 750 hours a month of t4g.small, which is one instance running continuously; the Free plan also names T3.micro, T3.small, T4g.micro, C7i-flex.large and M7i-flex.large as eligible |
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| Retention | 'After your free account plan expires, your account closes automatically, and you lose access to your resources and data. AWS retains your content for 90 days before permanently deleting your account and all associated resources.' |
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| Interface | ssh, rest, cli A real EC2 instance with an SSH key pair, a public IPv4 or IPv6 address, security groups, and the full AWS API and CLI |
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| Tooling | any SSH client; the AWS CLI or console |
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| Reliability | No reliability event observed. The vendor states it may reclaim resources unused for 3 months: 'If you have not used the AWS resources provided under an Offer during the previous 3 months, we may reclaim those AWS resources after giving you 30 days' notice.' |
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| Notes | Four caveats, and the first is the important one. (1) 'Most' is not 'all': the page says a payment method may be requested for additional verification, and when it is, USD 1 is held for 3 to 5 days. That is a real possibility, not a certainty, so the row is caveated rather than clean. (2) The Free plan closes the account at six months or when the credits run out, and the credits are spendable on anything, so an expensive shape burns the plan early and a cheap one does not extend it. (3) The t4g.small trial is advertised until 2026-12-31, which is about two months from this reading, so a person starting now gets the shorter of six months and that date. (4) The 750 hours are per month, so a single instance at 24/7 uses the whole allowance and a second instance is billed. Egress for this shape is not published on any page read. This record does not supersede amazon-web-services-free-tier, which prices the credit offer. |
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| Evidence note | documented The t4g.small free trial, its 750-hour allowance, the 2026-12-31 end date, the Free plan's six-month life, the automatic account closure and the 'most new customers' payment-method statement are all quoted from AWS's own pages read. |
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| Parsed numbers | - price USD 0 10 hours a day / month
- price USD 0 / month
- has-free-tier 1
- volume-quota 750 hours / month
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