Charges under free tier for CPU credits
Hi, i have an EC2 t3.micro (free tier elegible in Stockolm), but on my billing dashboard appears a charge related to the CPU credits. The hourly usage appears but at zero euros. So, now I think I understand the cpu usage credits and the baseline: i get the instance for free but if i spend all my cpu credits (bc i was doing a cpu intensive task) i have to pay for the credits, even at free tier? Can't i have a above baseline on the free tier actually for free? Would be nice to know since i'm a newbie. Thanks.
Free tier does have some restrictions, and some options when you launch an instance have extra charges. Most likely is that you left the default "Unlimited" setting on, which does say underneath "Additional charges may apply". This means that once CPU credits are exhausted your instance won't be throttled, it will continue to run at full speed and incur extra charges above the hourly instance price.
In addition to what @Rob_H said above, AWS Budgets also has an option to stop the instance if it goes over budget or is forecasted to go over budget. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws-cloud-financial-management/get-started-with-aws-budgets-actions/
Relevant questions
Memory and CPU allocation for EC2 on Free Tier.
asked 2 months agoFree Tier - EC2 MySQL or RDS MySQL
Accepted Answerasked 3 years agoFree tier billing for DynamoDB missing transfers?
asked 2 days agoFree tier usage Sagemaker
asked 3 years agoDeleted ec2 instances will be counted in free tier? [duplicate]
Accepted Answerasked 3 years agoAWS RDS & Cloudwatch Free Tier Charges
asked 2 months agoHow to run my website under free tier promotion?
Accepted Answerasked a month agoCharges under free tier for CPU credits
asked 6 months agoAWS Free Tier: Pricing Estimate if non-free
asked 4 months agoIs PostgreSQL available under the free tier?
asked 7 months ago
This is exactly right, T3 unlimited instances can exceed the CPU credits and free tier eligibility. I would recommend setting up some monitoring on your spend to keep track of the usage that way. It will help notify you if it goes over a threshold for the month. https://aws.amazon.com/aws-cost-management/aws-budgets/