In this conversation, Rachel Stephens is joined by Bowen Wang, Principal Product Marketing Manager at AWS. They discuss the newly enhanced AWS Free Tier program, which provides new customers with a zero-cost environment to experiment and learn about AWS services. That’s right: no surprise billing! Come learn about how new customers can sign up for a zero-cost environment for up to six months and can receive up to $200 in credits upon sign up.

• For more information visit https://aws.amazon.com/free/
• Here’s the Corey Quinn post referenced by Bowen: https://www.duckbillgroup.com/blog/aws-finally-fixes-its-free-tier-problem/

This is a RedMonk video, sponsored by Amazon.

Transcript

Rachel Stephens: Hi everyone, I’m Rachel Stephens and I am so delighted to be joining Bowen Wang today. We are at AWS New York Summit and we’re here to talk about the new free tier that Amazon has just launched. Bowen, can you give us a quick intro and let us know who you are and what you’re working on? \

Bowen Wang: Sure. Hi everyone, thanks for having me again. My name is Bowen Wang. I am part of the AWS Building and Cost Management Service Team as their Principal Product Marketing Manager. So in my daily job, I help customers and partners understand the tools we have to help them analyze, optimize, and plan for their investments with AWS.

Rachel: Very cool. And as I hinted here, we have a new announcement coming from your group today. Do you want to tell us a little bit? So I think probably developers in general and users of AWS are familiar with the existing free tier. A lot of people have used it to kick tires on projects, prototype, figure things out as their bootstrapping projects. But I think there’s also a lot of limitations that people have maybe run into with the existing free tier. So let’s just talk about what this new iteration looks like and what you’re announcing today.

Bowen: Sure thing. So we made enhancements to AWS free tier program. So what it does is it provides customers with easy and free access to a broader range of AWS services and features with a straightforward credit-based systems. So we provide customers with a credit-based system, which means $100 upon sign-up, no question asked. And you can also earn additional $100 when you activate essential AWS services. I think one of the things that customers worry about most in the past is the potential cost or unexpected spend with AWS.

Rachel: Absolutely.

Bowen: And with this launch, we have introduced a new concept called AWS Free Account Plan. So if you sign up and choose AWS Free Account Plan, you will be experimenting and learning with AWS in a zero-cost environment for up to six months.

Rachel: Got it. And I think you hit the nail on the head in terms of feedback that I’ve gotten from people in terms of, I forgot to shut this service down or I didn’t set my limits correctly and all of a sudden I have a surprise bill. But this is a zero-cost environment for six months.

Bowen: Exactly. So that’s definitely one of the core concepts we introduced with this free tier program. So for new customers upon sign-up, you will still give us your contact information. And during the sign-up, you will be presented with two options, either a free plan or a paid plan. So if you select paid plan during the sign-up process, you’ll be able to access 100-plus services and features and still receive the credits I mentioned earlier, up to $200 AWS credits upon sign-up. But when you use different services, it will be zero-cost because AWS will be applying the credits on behalf of you to all the eligible services. So you’ll be able to access the services until you’re ready to explicitly upgrade your accounts to the pay plan.

Rachel: Gotcha. I want to dive into the service question a little bit more because I think in the existing free tier, one of the things that’s a little bit challenging for people as you get started is that different services have different limits. So is that kind of how this credit system has been elaborated? Or let’s elaborate on the credit system. What services kind of open? Can we apply these credits to? How do we get these credits? Just how does this all work?

Bowen: Yes. So for AWS free tier, the concept of this is to give customers the beginning stage of learning about individual services without incurring any cost. Right. But before this introduction of the credit-based free tier program, individual services have come up with specific usage type or usage amount or time limit on their services. And for customers, if you are trying to experiment with different architecture design, you may or may not want to use a specific resource type that have made available as part of the specific services feature limit. So with this credit-based free tier program, you’ll be able to expand your resource selection range with more service options. And then you’ll be able to expand it for EC2 instance types or RDS instance types. And there’s no limitation, for example, with all the requests. Amazon lacks well-processed. So you’ll be able to just include more services or resource types in your architecture design as you see fit. And then you’ll apply the credits on your behalf to those services usage.

Rachel: Gotcha. So it really sounds like it’s going to help people explore tools a little bit more easily, easier onboarding, beyond just not costing anything, which I think is lovely. Most people are really into free. In terms of how else can this help foster experimentation and learning and how have you kind of seen reactions to this?

Bowen: As far as we believe when you are early stage customers, let’s say you are students or entrepreneurs or aspiring developers, you want to be able to have a trust with AWS. You want to be able to make sure that you can learn with AWS without worrying about incurring any cost. But at the same time, we will give you guidance in terms of what are the core services you can get started with AWS. One thing I want to mention that for the credit-based systems, we are actually introducing the incentives for customers to unlock certain services, such as AWS budgets. So this is a core service for us to teach customers to understand how to monitor their spend and to set up their intentional budgetary limits so they can receive alert notifications when their spend exceeds the budgetary limit. So once they have the trust and the right behaviors or habits in place, that’s a time they can tell us that, hey, I’m ready to upgrade to the pay plan. So we believe those right expectations and trust with AWS is very fundamental for early stage customers.

Rachel: I like it. So to reiterate what you said, it’s a completely free sandbox account until the customer has requested to upgrade and you have an incentive to understand what the budget system and tool looks like prior to doing that upgrade so that people as they’re moving and graduating out of this account will understand the spending limits and tool structure for when their account grows. Is that right?

Bowen: Yes, exactly. So I want to call it this two-time difference. The free-tier credits you receive during the sign-up process, it’s $200. That is valid for 12 months. But the complete zero-cost environment for a free account plan is valid for up to six months or whenever you deplete your free-tier credits. So yes, let’s say in the middle of your free-account plan practice, you believe you’re ready to upgrade to the pay plan. You’ll be able to do that and all the unused free-tier credits will roll over to your account and will also be applied to all eligible services. And who’s eligible to sign up for this? For this free-tier program, we are making it available for new customers. So that’s new customers who sign up online on or after July 15th, or if you are part of the early access customers doing a rollout from July 9th to 15th. The reason why we’re doing that is we want to make sure that this free-tier experience is good for new customers and for existing customers. We do not want to interrupt with any of your existing free-tier experience with the services I offer, the specific service free-tier limit.

Rachel: Gotcha. Let’s move that in just a little bit more. How does this free-tier interact with the existing free-tier? Totally separate programs. There are interaction points. Let’s just make sure people understand that part.

Bowen: So we mentioned earlier that if you’re existing customers, you will definitely continue to be benefited from the existing free-tier program. For this new free-tier program, we offer you for up to $200 free-tier credits. But still, as AWS customers, you can still access 30-plus services that offer short-term trials or the additional services that offer the perpetual-free services. So you will still have that access to those perpetual free-tier limits, but the free-tier credits will be available to cover the usage that exceeds the perpetual free-tier limits.

Rachel: Gotcha. And the new free-tier is explicitly for new customers, correct?

Bowen: That is correct. Yes.

Rachel: Okay. Wonderful. So if people are excited about this, what do they need to have in order to sign up? Are there any gotchas or things that they should know about in the sign-up process?

Bowen: During the sign-up process, we qualify you as new customers to have a brand-new email address and a credit card information that is currently not associated with any existing AWS account. And we mentioned earlier that you can choose a free account plan and they have to give us explicit opt in to move to the paid plan. But there are a few use cases that we will auto upgrade you to the paid plan because by then we believe you are ready to still adoption with AWS. Such as if you started to join the APN network, if you purchase a skill builder team subscriptions, if your accounts become part of AWS organizations, we will definitely send you a notification and let you know that your account is upgraded to the pay plan.

Rachel: Gotcha. So this is designed for new users, individual account owners, and for obvious learning, kicking the tires.

Bowen: Exactly. You’re correct. Yeah.

Rachel: Wonderful. People are excited and want to learn more. Where should they go?

Bowen: We have our aws.amazon.com/free. That’s our feature website. We have a newly revamped website with clear definitions of different account plans and all the services that will be available in the free or paid account plan. So that’s definitely one place to go. We have clear documentations and news blog. I want to make a plug, that’s not a usual plug. If you are a follower of Corey Quinn’s newsletter, he just published that. Personally, I do think that’s a pretty detailed description of what AWS’s free-tier program looks like.

Rachel: RedMonk also seconds following Corey. I love this. Bowen thank you so much for your time today and for carving time out of this event to talk with me about this exciting news. Thank you so much. And everyone, go check out the free tier.

Bowen: It’s been fun. Thank you.