Chapter 1 of 6 · 2 min
Is Amazon S3 free?
No, but it is close. A new Amazon account gets $100 of credit for six months, and after that a phone-full of photos costs $2.30 a month to keep.
Accounts opened since July 2025 get Free Tier credits rather than free storage: $100 at sign-up and up to $100 more for trying key services, usable on S3 for six months or until they run out. Older accounts had 5 GB free for a year, and every one of those is past it now.
What stays free for everyone
- The first 100 GB that leave Amazon for the internet each month, counted across your whole account.
- Files coming in, however many.
- Deleting, and moving files between Amazon services in the same region.
What you pay once the credit is gone
- $2.30a month
- 100 GB on the normal shelf: 25,000 phone photos or 100,000 Word documents
- $0.23a month
- 10 GB, a small business worth of contracts and invoices
So a small bucket costs pocket change, from the first file. The next answer puts the number beside the things in your own cupboard.
Prices are for US East, October 2026. Amazon S3 pricing: what 1 TB costs per month has every rate and the steps.
NEXT · CHAPTER 2 OF 6What does 100 GB cost to keep?$2.30 a month. The second half of the answer is the interesting one.S3 Savings reads three months of your real S3 bill and shows which of these answers apply to your buckets. Free, read-only, no card.