Does the AWS Billing Management Dashboard take into account Free Tier usage

Question

About a month ago I opened an AWS account to try out Amazon's own tutorial for EC2 services, only to give up after encountering an error.

Today I accessed my account once again, only to find out three tasks have been running in the background the whole month. My Billing Management Dashboard shows a hefty total in the upper right, but in the "free usage" tier the only exceeded entry is S3 Puts, of about 10%.

I can't seem to find a soruce anywhere in the documentation explaining whether the total billing in the upper right takes into account the Free Tier or not. At the end of this month, will I be billed entirely or only the % difference? I'm more or less okay with the latter, but I can't really afford the former.

I've obviously opened a support ticket right away, but since I'm on the basic plan I'm afraid they might answer me after the current bill becomes active.

Thank you for any answers.

Answer 1

You will be billed only for the % difference.

All services that offer a free tier have limits on what you can use without being charged. Many services have multiple types of limits. For example, Amazon EC2 has limits on both the type of instance you can use, and how many hours you can use in one month. Amazon S3 has a limit on how much memory you can use, and also on how often you can call certain operations each month. For example, the free tier covers the first 20,000 times you retrieve a file from Amazon S3, but you are charged for additional file retrievals. Each service has limits that are unique to that service.

Source: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/awsaccountbilling/latest/aboutv2/free-tier-limits.html