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How I got billed even though I had registered as an AWS Free Tier user

Amazon AWS offers 12 months free tier to get started with their services. At a high level went through this link and created a free tier account to play around.

Approximately after a month checked the Billing dashboard and was surprised to see that I am getting billed $0.81 for some usage under the heading "Elastic Cloud Compute" (EC2).

Points mentioned about EC2 in AWS Free tier - 12 Months Introductory Period


So I was mindful of those numbers mentioned there alone. But only after seeing the detailed bill understood that there are few items which are getting billed on an hourly basis even within Free Tier.

Billing Dashboard:



Billing Summary



Billing Details


Looks like NAT Gateway & Elastic IP address usage are charged even in Free Tier.

$0.056 per GB Data Processed by NAT Gateways
$0.056 per NAT Gateway Hour (I had used it for 6 hrs)
$0.005 per Elastic IP address not attached to a running instance per hour on a pro rata basis (I had used it for 72.4 hrs)

Just blogged it for those like me who weren't aware or didn't read some fine print where they might(!!) have actually mentioned this :) But for now I consider it as a hidden charges and frankly expected Amazon to upfront list down all things which are chargeable in Free tier.

Also would suggest to read about Billing Alarms

"If you want the alarm to trigger as soon as you go over the free tier, set When my total AWS charges for the month exceed to $.01. This means that you'll receive a notification as soon as you incur a charge. Otherwise, set it to the amount you want to trigger the alarm, and you will be notified when you go over that amount."

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