The Complete Free Tier Inventory

Cloud Engineering Architecture

Always Free (no expiry):

  • AWS Lambda: 1 million requests + 400,000 GB-seconds compute per month
  • DynamoDB: 25 GB storage + 25 WCU + 25 RCU
  • API Gateway: 1 million API calls per month
  • CloudWatch: 10 custom metrics, 10 alarms, 5 GB log data ingestion
  • SNS: 1 million publishes
  • SQS: 1 million requests
  • CodeBuild: 100 build minutes per month

12 Months Free (from account creation):

  • EC2 t2.micro or t3.micro: 750 hours/month
  • RDS db.t2.micro: 750 hours + 20 GB storage
  • S3: 5 GB storage + 20K GET + 2K PUT requests
  • ELB: 750 hours + 15 GB data processing
  • CloudFront: 1 TB data transfer out
  • Elastic Cache t2.micro: 750 hours

The Full DevOps Portfolio Built on ₹0

Using only free tier resources, here's what you can build:

  1. 3-tier web app: EC2 (app) + RDS (database) + S3 (static assets) + CloudFront (CDN)
  2. CI/CD pipeline: CodeBuild (build) + CodePipeline + EC2 (deploy target)
  3. Serverless API: Lambda + API Gateway + DynamoDB + CloudWatch
  4. Monitoring: CloudWatch + custom dashboards (10 free metrics)
  5. Storage automation: Lambda → S3 lifecycle → SNS alerts

How to Avoid Accidental Bills

  • Set a billing alert at $1 immediately after account creation (CloudWatch → Billing)
  • Use aws ce get-cost-and-usage daily to check spend
  • Always stop EC2 instances when not in use (stopped = no compute charge, just EBS)
  • Delete NAT Gateways when done — these are NOT free tier and cost ~$32/month if left running
  • Use t2.micro or t3.micro only — other instance types are NOT free
💡 The ₹0 challenge: Build and deploy a complete 3-tier web application with a CI/CD pipeline and basic monitoring using only AWS Free Tier. If you can do this — and explain every component — you're already interview-ready.