AWS free tier vs paid services: Which tier actually makes sense for SMBs

Free tier gets you started. EC2 (1 year free), RDS (1 year free), Lambda (1 million invocations free). But "free" expires or limits are tight.

Free tier benefits

Great for learning. Zero risk. Prod-like environment, low cost.

Expires: EC2 after 1 year. Lambda limits are plenty.

When to move to paid

When usage exceeds free limits. When production requires reliability, paid support, guaranteed capacity.

For SMBs: usually after 3-6 months in production.

Surprising free-tier limits

EC2: 1 small instance, free. 2 instances? Second one costs.

RDS: 1 database, 750 hours/month free. Second database costs.

Lambda: 1 million invocations free. Beyond that, charged per million.

Data transfer: 1GB/month free (between regions). Beyond that, charged.

Real SMB pattern

Month 1-3: Free tier works. Dev/test in free tier.

Month 4-6: Production hits free limits. Move to paid.

Month 6+: Optimize. Compress data, reduce instances, cache aggressively.

Cost at scale

Typical SMB (5 instances, 1 RDS, 100GB S3): £100-200/month.

With optimization: £50-100/month.

Where Critical Cloud comes in

Cost management starts with understanding what you're paying for. Most SMBs don't. Free tier looks free until it doesn't.

We track what you use and what it costs. You see it clearly.

If AWS bills are hard to predict, see how Critical Support works.