What AWS services cost money even on free tier?
Elastic IPs when not attached to a running instance (~$3.60/month), NAT Gateway ($0.045/hour + data), Load Balancer (~$16/month), EBS beyond 30 GB ($0.08/GB), and data transfer out beyond 100 GB/month ($0.09/GB).
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More FAQs in AWS Cost Optimization and Free Tier Keeping Your Node.js Deployment Affordable
750 hours per month of t2.micro instances for 12 months. This is enough to run one instance 24/7 (730 hours/month). Also includes 30 GB of EBS storage and 750 hours of AWS Lambda.
Use the free tier (t2.micro, MongoDB Atlas free tier, Vercel/Netlify for frontend), stop instances when not in use, use Spot instances for non-critical work, choose the right instance type, use reserved instances for production, and set up billing alerts.
Only for production instances that run 24/7 and you know you'll need long-term. 1-year reserved gives 30-40% discount, 3-year gives 50-75%. For development, use on-demand or spot instances instead.
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