Can I use AWS EKS under the new Free Tier credit-based model without being charged?

You are correct that Amazon EKS is not part of the always-free services, but you can use it during your Free Tier period as long as your total usage remains within the available $100–$200 in promotional credits. This includes charges for the EKS control plane, EC2 instances used as worker nodes, EBS volumes, data transfer, and any other associated resources.

There are a few important considerations:

• The EKS control plane incurs a fixed cost (approximately $0.10 per hour per cluster in most regions).
• Worker nodes (EC2), load balancers, storage, and network data transfer can add up quickly depending on your configuration.
• Some third-party marketplace charges or services not covered by credits may still be billed separately.

As long as your account has active credits, AWS will apply those automatically to eligible charges. Once your Free Tier credits are fully consumed, you will begin incurring charges unless you manually stop or terminate the running resources.

Importantly, your account will not be closed automatically if your credits run out. However, it’s your responsibility to monitor usage and avoid unexpected charges by setting up budgets and billing alerts through AWS Budgets.

I recommend reviewing your usage regularly via the Billing and Cost Explorer dashboards, and terminating unused resources promptly to stay within the Free Tier limits.