AWS (Amazon Web Services)

The wiki's first hyperscaler — the high end of the spectrum the other pages defined against. Where hetzner-cloud sells one cheap box and render/railway/fly-io/ vercel sell a deploy workflow, AWS sells everything, à la carte (200+ services): you assemble the box, the network, the database, the queue, the CDN, each separately metered. It anchors the "raw IaaS" end well past hetzner-cloud in breadth and complexity (and, usually, per-resource cost).

The free tier — a credit funnel (revamped 2025)

AWS moved its free tier toward a credit model (oracle-cloud-free's closest analog, sharpened):

• Up to $200 in credits for new accounts — $100 on signup + up to $100 earned by exploring services.
• Free Plan: runs 6 months from opening or until the credits run out, whichever comes first (re-verified 2026-08-13 — the "whichever comes first" clause is the operative one; the 6-month figure alone overstates the runway for anyone who actually uses the credit).
• 30+ always-free services within monthly usage limits, on free and paid plans (the classic Lambda/DynamoDB always-free allowances persist, though this page states them only as "within monthly usage limits").

So the same "free has a shape" mechanic the synthesis tracks applies — but AWS's shape is a time-boxed credit burn-down (6-month expiry) rather than oracle-cloud-free's permanent Always-Free allotment or render's spin-down. It is an acquisition funnel into PAYG, like the others, just with the steepest post-funnel complexity.

Where it sits

AWS is the baseline the cost-model spectrum implicitly references: Tier-2 PaaS pitches ("no overprovisioning," "no idle markup," git-push deploys) are largely pitches against assembling raw AWS yourself. Its breadth is also why managed PaaS exists — render is Heroku-lineage precisely to hide this. Tracked as the anchor, not yet with neutral price-performance data (the standing sourcing caveat: vendor surface, not third-party benchmark).

A distinct compute shape — aws-lambda-microvms

Beyond the à-la-carte breadth, AWS now ships aws-lambda-microvms — Firecracker-based isolated VM sandboxes with a serverless model and, distinctively, state-preserving suspend/resume (up to 8h; suspended = no charge). It's a new point on the wiki's cost-model spectrum (per-second compute + warm scale-to-zero) and is pitched first at agent sandboxes for running LLM-generated code — the cross-spoke seam to agentic-tooling-wiki.

Related

hetzner-cloud · oracle-cloud-free · digitalocean · cloudflare · vercel · aws-lambda-microvms · synthesis

Re-tiered 2026-08-21 → T1. Under the corpus rule (../QUALITY.md → tier by the claim, not the URL), this page rests on the AWS Free Tier page, read first-party. What the page is here for is the terms of the offer — the credit model, what the credits cover, how long they last — and Amazon is the only authority on its own pricing terms. The "credit funnel" reading of those terms is this wiki's analysis, not AWS's claim, and it is argued from the terms rather than taken from the page.