Setting the file. One moment.
- Credits apply AFTER free tier (free tier is consumed first)
- Credits do NOT cover: Route53 domain registration, Marketplace purchases, Support plan upgrades, third-party billed services
- Credits expire (typically 1-2 years from activation) — check Billing Console → Credits
24.9
Credits Strategy
81
Creating Amazon Aurora Db Cluster With Instances
104
Routing Traffic With Route53 And CloudFront
Resilience Program Design
Creating API Gateway Stage
These eat credits even at zero traffic:
- NAT Gateway data processing: Chatty services behind NAT can burn $100+/mo in processing alone
- CloudWatch Logs default retention: “Never expire” = costs accumulate forever. Set 7d dev / 30d prod.
- Stopped EC2 still pays for EBS, unattached volumes, idle ALBs
- Over-provisioned RDS at 5% CPU — use Aurora Serverless v2 instead
- Dev environments running 24/7 — schedule stop outside business hours
- Stay within free tier entirely — Lambda + DynamoDB + S3 all scale to zero
- No custom VPC — Lambda, DynamoDB, S3 work without one
- No NAT Gateway under any circumstances
- Replace NAT Gateway with VPC endpoints for S3/DynamoDB (free)
- DynamoDB on-demand only — you don’t know access patterns yet
- Use Graviton (ARM) for Lambda and Fargate — 20% cheaper for free
- Audit monthly with
aws ce get-cost-and-usage
- Savings Plans ONLY after 3+ months of stable usage data
- Start with 1-year Compute Savings Plan, No Upfront
- Cover only 50-70% of baseline — leave room for variability
- Enable Cost Anomaly Detection (catches unexpected spikes)
If credits expire in <3 months with significant balance remaining, spend on things you’ll need anyway:
- Staging/DR environments you were going to build
- Load tests and performance benchmarks
- Bedrock model experimentation
- Observability buildout (dashboards, alarms, tracing)
Don’t spin up resources just to burn credits — that’s worse than letting some expire.
references/credits-strategy.md