AWS increases free credits to $200 for new users

Amazon Web Services has quietly given would‑be builders a bigger on‑ramp: every brand‑new AWS account created on or after 15 July 2025 now receives up to US $200 in promotional credits—a doubling of the long‑standing zero‑dollar Free Tier that first debuted in 2011. Under the revised offer, AWS automatically drops US $100 (about ₦150,000) into the billing console at sign‑up, then unlocks a second US $100 once the customer spins up core services such as Amazon EC2, RDS, Lambda, Bedrock or even the new Budgets dashboard; both tranches can be applied to any of 200‑plus services and remain valid for twelve months, alongside the usual 12‑month usage allowances for S3, DynamoDB and other staples.

The timing—announced during Swami Sivasubramanian’s keynote at AWS Summit New York—signals how urgently Amazon wants first‑time developers, students and startup founders to experiment with its AI stack. Credits can offset GPU instances for model fine‑tuning, Bedrock inference calls, AgentCore test runs or old‑school web servers, and they arrive just weeks after Google Cloud refreshed its own “first‑90‑days US $300” perk and Microsoft extended Azure’s US $200/30‑day voucher. By matching Azure’s headline amount but stretching redemption over a full year, AWS is betting that a slower burn will translate into higher stickiness once the credits expire.

For cash‑strapped Nigerian startups—or any team outside the traditional VC hotbeds—the extra US $200 can cover roughly four months of a t3.medium EC2 instance, 750 k inference tokens on Amazon Bedrock’s Claude 3 Haiku, or a small Kubernetes dev cluster. Crucially, the credits are stackable with regional programmes such as AWS Activate, which still offers up to US $100,000 for venture‑backed companies, and with sector‑specific awards like the AWS Non‑Profit Credit programme. Entrepreneurs who graduate beyond Free Tier limits therefore have a gentler cost curve before pay‑as‑you‑go rates kick in.

AWS hasn’t raised the ceiling on Free Tier allowances themselves—S3 keeps its 5 GB allotment and Lambda its one‑million monthly requests—but internal road‑maps hint at future “service‑specific boosters,” including targeted vector‑database minutes and SageMaker Studio hours, designed to nudge users toward generative‑AI workloads. Even without those sweeteners, the fresh credits already shift the psychological barrier to entry: any developer can now fire up a GPU notebook, prototype an LLM‑powered chatbot, and still have money left for deployment testing, all before a single invoice lands.

Amazon says the move aligns with its goal of “lowering the cost of curiosity,” yet the calculus is also commercial. Once a project is hooked into AWS IAM, CloudWatch and Billing integrations, migrating to another cloud becomes far less appealing—especially if that project begins monetising. In that sense the Free Tier refresh is both gift and glue. A modest outlay today that could anchor thousands of tomorrow’s high‑margin workloads.

Well, spinning up your first microservice or AI proof‑of‑concept just got 200‑dollars easier, and the clock to turn those credits into traction starts the moment you click “Create an AWS account.” You can actually use this credit to set up and simulate real life workloads. Start building