Unexpected bill from AWS?

Question

I'm using AWS, and my usage is well within the free tier, however I recently got an unexpected bill. The only item costing me money was as follows:

Amazon RDS for MySQL Community Edition
     $0.035 per RDS Micro Instance hour (or partial hour)    724 Hr    $25.34

The free usage tier specifies the following:

Amazon RDS for MySQL and Oracle (BYOL) - Free Trial (Per Month):
750 hours of Amazon RDS Small Single-AZ Instance usage – enough hours to run continuously each month

My DB instance type is listed as db.t1.micro. Does this mean I need to upgrade to a db.m1.small for it to be free?

Answer 1

Yes. The free tier for RDS SQL Server applies to micro, but the free tier for RDS MySQL requires small.

http://aws.amazon.com/rds/free-trial/

http://aws.amazon.com/rds/sqlserver/free/

Don't forget to downgrade back to micro at the end of 12 months if that's all the power you need.

If $25 breaks your budget, you might try contacting AWS billing support to let them know the policy is confusing and that you were just trying to use the cheapest RDS option, assuming that would be covered in the free tier.

http://aws.amazon.com/contact-us/