CloudAPIcredits

AWS Review for Developers and Founders

$200 credit-based free plan, Activate credits to $200,000, Bedrock on one bill. Independent review by the CloudAPIcredits editorial team, updated November 2, 2026.

4.2/ 5
Editor rating

Our verdict

AWS is the provider we’d send a founder with any investor connection to, and we give it 4.2 out of 5. Activate Portfolio reaches $200,000 for a provider-backed startup, those credits spend on third-party models in Bedrock, and the new Free plan can’t produce a surprise bill. The six-month Free plan clock is what costs it. The hard deletion that follows punishes anyone who opens an account, gets busy and comes back in month eight to find nothing there.

AWS credits and programs (5) Visit AWS ↗

What we like

  • $100 credit on sign-up, no payment method for most customers
  • Free plan can’t incur charges, so there’s no bill shock
  • Activate Portfolio credits reach $200,000 and cover Bedrock models
  • Batch inference on Bedrock priced 50% below on-demand rates
  • Flex service tier cuts Bedrock Standard pricing in half

What to watch

  • Free plan ends at six months, account deleted 90 days later
  • Free plan accounts can’t receive Activate or any promotional credit
  • Bedrock pricing tables render client-side, so rates are hard to audit
  • Legacy 12-month free tier only for accounts opened before July 15, 2025

Why AWS counts as both kinds of provider

Amazon Web Services is the cloud arm of Amazon, launched in 2006 and run from Seattle. For this site it matters in two ways. It sells infrastructure, meaning compute, storage, databases and networking across more than 30 Regions. It also sells model inference through Amazon Bedrock, which hosts models from Anthropic, Meta, Mistral, DeepSeek, OpenAI open-weight releases and Amazon itself behind one API and one bill.

That combination is what separates AWS from a pure AI API vendor. Credits issued by AWS apply across both halves, so an Activate grant can pay for the EC2 box, the RDS database and the Claude calls in the same month. AWS states outright that Activate credits are redeemable on third-party models on Bedrock, which is the detail most founders are looking for.

How the free credits work now

On July 15, 2025 AWS replaced the 12-month free tier for new accounts with a credit model. A new account receives $100 immediately and earns $20 for each of five activities: creating a budget, launching an EC2 instance, exploring RDS, deploying a Lambda function and running a Bedrock prompt. The ceiling is $200. You choose a Free plan or a Paid plan at sign-up, and both receive the same credits.

The Free plan lasts six months or until the balance is spent. It blocks services that could drain the credit fast, it can’t be charged, and it’s ineligible for other promotional offers. The Paid plan opens every service, applies credits automatically and bills the overage to your card. Accounts created before July 15, 2025 keep the legacy program with its 12-month trials and short-term trials, so older documentation and newer documentation disagree for a reason.

What stays free on both plans

Separate from the credits, AWS keeps more than 30 always-free allowances that apply on both plans and never expire. Lambda gives you 1 million requests and 400,000 GB-seconds per month. DynamoDB gives 25 GB of storage with 25 read and 25 write capacity units per Region. CloudFront runs a Free plan at $0 per month with 100 GB of data transfer out and 1 million requests. Credits only start to burn once usage climbs past these lines, which for a small API backend may be never.

Bedrock has no always-free token allowance. Every prompt is metered at the per-token rate for the model you call and deducted from the credit balance, which is why the $20 Bedrock activity is a small but real test of the billing path. Provisioned Concurrency on Lambda is also excluded from the free allowance, a detail that lives in a footnote on the Lambda page.

What you pay after the credits

Compute and storage are on-demand by the second or by the gigabyte-month, with Savings Plans and Reserved Instances for commitment discounts that promotional credit won’t cover upfront. Bedrock is priced per 1,000 or per million tokens, split by input and output. AWS’s worked example is Amazon Titan Text Lite at $0.0003 per 1,000 input tokens and $0.0004 per 1,000 output tokens; Claude, Nova and Llama rates sit in tables that load in the browser, so check them in the console Region you plan to use.

Three levers change what you pay without changing the model. Batch inference is priced 50% below on-demand for select Anthropic, Meta, Mistral and Amazon models. The Flex service tier runs at a 50% discount to Standard and Priority at a 75% premium. Prompt caching bills cache reads at a fraction of input price, and AWS cut the Claude Sonnet 5.5 cache read rate by half on October 7, 2026. Credits don’t offset sales or use taxes, and each redemption code works once on one account.

Credits for startups, researchers and students

AWS Activate is the main event. Founders, for self-funded companies, starts at $1,000 and can reach $5,000 for select participants. Portfolio, for startups with an Org ID from an accelerator, angel group or VC in the Activate Provider network, reaches $200,000. You need to be pre-Series B, founded within the last 10 years, on the Paid plan, and either new to Activate or asking for more than you received before. Applications go through an AWS Builder ID and answers arrive in 5 to 10 business days.

AWS Cloud Credit for Research funds faculty, research staff and graduate students at accredited institutions, with student awards capped at $5,000 and faculty awards uncapped. Reviews take 90 to 120 days on a rolling basis. AWS Educate is a training program rather than a credit program: free labs and badges for anyone 13 or older, no card, no account funding. An invite-only tier called AWS Credits for AI Startups sits above Portfolio for companies already scaling, and a Kiro credits offer ran until December 31, 2025.

Models and services worth your credits

For AI work the services to know are Bedrock for hosted inference, Bedrock AgentCore for agent runtime on the Paid plan, SageMaker for training, and Lambda plus API Gateway for the glue. Bedrock added Priority, Standard and Flex service tiers on November 18, 2025 so one application can mix fast interactive calls with cheap deferred ones, chosen per request. Cross-Region inference profiles route calls across Regions, and the geographic variant carries a premium.

Model choice is broad enough that most teams never leave the platform for inference. Claude, Nova, Llama, Mistral, DeepSeek, Qwen and gpt-oss models all appear in the catalog, and the Flex and Priority tiers launched first on gpt-oss, DeepSeek V3.1, Qwen3 and Nova Pro and Premier. For credits, that means one Activate grant covers experiments across vendors without a separate API key and a separate card per company.

The deadline and other traps

The main risk is the Free plan deadline. AWS sends reminders at 15, 7 and 2 days, suspends the account at six months, holds the data for 90 days and then erases everything. The second risk is accidental upgrade: joining AWS Organizations, Control Tower, the Partner Network, or buying a Skill Builder Team subscription converts a Free plan to Paid automatically and kills the activity credits. The third is the upgrade itself, which can’t be undone.

Support plans are a cost that credits only partly cover. Developer and Business support can be paid with promotional credit, but the terms exclude Enterprise Support, Enterprise On-Ramp and reseller support. Quota increases go through Service Quotas and are generally granted on Paid accounts, while the Free plan restricts the service list rather than the quotas. Identity verification can still require a card even on the Free plan.

Our verdict for founders and solo developers

Yes for a founder with any investor affiliation, because Portfolio credits reach a number no other provider on this site matches at the pre-Series B stage, and they spend on third-party models. Yes for a solo developer who wants to learn Bedrock without a card, as long as a calendar reminder is set for month five. Less so for a hobby project that will sit idle, since the six-month deletion makes AWS a poor place to park a dormant account. We give it 4.2: strong programs and clear terms, held back by a deadline that’s easy to miss.

Best for

  • Pre-Series B startups with an accelerator or VC in the Activate Provider network
  • Teams that want infrastructure and multi-vendor model inference on one bill
  • Developers learning Bedrock who want a trial that can’t charge a card
  • Research groups that can wait 90 to 120 days for a credit decision

Not ideal for

  • Side projects that will go dormant for more than six months
  • Founders who need startup credits without first adding a payment method
  • Anyone expecting a 12-month free tier on a new account

AWS FAQ

will aws charge my card on the free plan
No. The Free account plan can’t incur charges, and AWS won’t charge a payment method until you upgrade. The plan simply blocks services that could spend beyond the credit. Charges begin only after you choose Upgrade account and your usage exceeds the remaining credit balance.
can i switch from the aws free plan to paid later
Yes, at any time, by choosing Upgrade plan in the Billing and Cost Management console and then Upgrade account. The upgrade can’t be reversed. Remaining credits carry over and apply to eligible services until 12 months after the account was created. You can also upgrade during the 90-day retention window after the Free plan ends to reopen a suspended account.
how long do aws activate credits last
AWS doesn’t publish a validity period for Activate credits. Under the promotional credit terms, every credit carries an expiration date shown when the code is issued, and unredeemed credit is forfeited at that date. Check the Credits page in Billing and Cost Management after redemption for the exact day, and put it next to the Free plan date in your calendar.
can i use aws credits on claude in bedrock
Yes. Activate credits are redeemable on third-party models on Amazon Bedrock, and Bedrock is available on both plans. Model usage is deducted at the on-demand per-token rate. The promotional credit terms exclude AWS Marketplace purchases, so a Marketplace listing of a model wouldn’t be covered, but Bedrock on-demand inference is.
does aws educate give free aws credits
No. AWS Educate provides free hands-on labs, a self-paced training library with badges and a job board for learners 18 and older. It requires only an email address, is open from age 13 and needs no credit card, but it doesn’t fund an AWS account. Students who need actual credits should look at Cloud Credit for Research, which caps student awards at $5,000.
what services are blocked on the aws free plan
The Free plan excludes services and features that could deplete credits quickly or involve hardware, which means Savings Plans, Reserved Instances and certain Marketplace offers. Bedrock AgentCore is Paid plan only. Short-term trials of select services are also Paid plan only. Everything else, including EC2, S3, RDS, Aurora, DynamoDB and Bedrock, is available.

How we review: ratings are written before we look at commission rates, and every fee and policy statement is checked against the platform's own help pages. Read our editorial policy.