AWS RDS & Cloudwatch Free Tier Charges

Question

Hi,

I started using RDS under AWS Free tier. As per documentation, I was expecting 750 hours of RDS single instance availability without any charge. Below are the details of the charge from billing. I had a basic test table with <100 rows of data. Is there some config change that I need to avoid this charge.

RDS
$0.115 per GB-month of provisioned gp2 storage running MySQL4.684 GB-Mo$0.54
$0.115 per RDS GB-month of provisioned GP2 storage3.006 GB-Mo$0.35

Similarly for Cloudwatch I am getting charges without specifically activating any alarm. Below is an alarm for my cloudwatch. My provisioned capacity range from 1-10 read / write per second. So not clear how is the below alarm applicable and why is there a charge for this alarm? Do I need to make some changes to DynamoDB & CloudWatch config?

In alarm	2022-03-26 22:44:22	ConsumedWriteCapacityUnits < 30 for 15 datapoints within 15 minutes

Regards,
DBeings

Answer

You say you've just started using RDS: but is this a new account?

The free tier for RDS is only valid for the first year of the account after it was created - if your account is older than that, you'll be charged for the RDS instance.

Answer

Hello there! Sorry to hear about your concerns with billing.

I suggest opening a support case with our Billing Team directly, so they can look at your specific resources and advise on how to resolve those charges: http://go.aws/support-center.

This documentation outlines free tier limitations for RDS- specifically, the instance size type will make a difference on how billing works: https://aws.amazon.com/rds/free/.

-- Leo W.

AWS RDS & Cloudwatch Free Tier Charges

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