I was using my AWS Free Tier account for a college project that utilizes a single instance of AWS S3 and RDS services. I was conscious of the free tier limits and being charged for exceeding the limits so I read everything carefully related to free tier limits on RDS and S3.
For RDS it is:-
750 hours of Amazon RDS Single-AZ db.t2.micro, db.t3.micro, and db.t4g.micro Instances usage running MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL databases each month. If running more than one instance, usage is aggregated across instance classes.
750 hours of Amazon RDS Single-AZ db.t2.micro Instance usage running SQL Server (running SQL Server Express Edition) each month.
20 GB of General Purpose SSD (gp2) storage per month.
Free backup storage up to 100% of the total provisioned storage size of your active DB instances for a region.*
Here is my service usage and the respective cost.
As we can see the usage quantity was only 617 hrs which is very much under the free tier limits and even for the Virtual Private Cloud. I don't understand why was I charged for the VPC?
Am I missing something
RDS Free Tier Charge
Free Tier RDS has been charged
Newbie question: My free tier RDS keeps exceeding the limit when it's barely used.
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Two possible reasons come to mind:
- The region / AZ you're trying doesn't have any t2.micro RDS instances available. Try a different AZ or different region. us-east-1 is usually a good bet
- It could be that the free tier offering hasn't kept up with the RDS instance availability. Nothing you can do about this.
Adding to Tim's Answer.
It could also be the DB Engine Version.
For example, for SQL Server.
- SQL Server 2019 and up, the DB instance class db.t2.micro is unavailable.
- SQL Server 2017 and below, the DB instance class db.t2.micro is available.
Try switching to SQL Server 2017.