About free tiel ec2 instance

It sounds like you're encountering some unexpected charges and notifications regarding your AWS free tier usage, particularly with the t2.micro EC2 instance. Here’s a few things you can check and steps you can take to understand and possibly resolve this issue:

Check EC2 Instance Usage: Even if you haven't launched a new instance in April, ensure that there are no running instances from previous months that you might have forgotten to terminate. Sometimes instances are left running unintentionally, leading to charges.

Review Billing Dashboard: AWS provides a detailed billing dashboard that can help you track your usage and any associated costs. Check the billing details to see what exactly you are being charged for—sometimes charges could be for other services or resources like Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes, Elastic IP addresses, or data transfer costs.

Understand Free Tier Limits: The AWS Free Tier for EC2 is typically available for the first 12 months after your account creation and has limits like 750 hours per month of t2.micro (or t3.micro in some regions) usage. If you exceed these limits, you will incur charges. Ensure you're not exceeding these limits.

Examine Alarms and Notifications: AWS sends notifications when you're nearing your free tier limit. It’s possible that these notifications might be triggered by other services under the free tier, not just EC2. Check if other AWS services you're using are nearing the free tier limit.

Contact AWS Support: If you've checked all the above and still find discrepancies or if things aren't clear, consider contacting AWS Support. If you’re on the basic plan, customer service for billing issues is available.

These steps should help you get a clearer picture of your situation and potentially resolve any incorrect charges.

https://aws.amazon.com/free/?all-free-tier

Free Tier
12 MONTHS FREE
Amazon EC2
750 Hours per month
Resizable compute capacity in the Cloud.

750 hours per month of Linux, RHEL, or SLES t2.micro or t3.micro instance dependent on region

750 hours per month of Windows t2.micro or t3.micro instance dependent on region

750 hours per month of public IPv4 address regardless of instance type

This is likely going to be one of two things.

Check you don't have any running instances in other regions - EC2 Global View can give you a view on what EC2 resources you have in all regions https://console.aws.amazon.com/ec2globalview/home#

The other one is related to where you say you didn't launch an instance in April - do you have any instances that you provisioned in February or March that still exist but are stopped? You won't be charged for compute for an instance that is stopped, but any EBS volumes that are provisioned will still be chargeable while they exist.

For example: t2.micro instance with 30GB attached, running all throughout April = 720 hours of EC2 + 720 GB-mo of EBS

The same t2.micro instance with 30GB attached, not running at all in April = 720 GB-mo of EBS

I'm guessing you would have got the alert about 85% of the way through April? That would make the arithmetic make sense, in that you would have hit 100% of Free Tier at exactly the end of the month.

The good news is that both these scenarios above are all in-scope of Free Tier, so you shouldn't be charged. If you do get charged, as in you get an invoice for a non-zero amount of EC2 usage and AWS actually takes payment from your billing method, then you can log a billing support call at https://support.console.aws.amazon.com/support/home#/case/create?issueType=customer-service

• Type: Account and billing
• Service: Billing