General

Q: What is the difference between Personal and Professional accounts? Which account should I choose while signing up?
Professional accounts are accounts that are created for a business or at an enterprise level, whereas Personal accounts are created for learning and experimenting with AWS services. We recommend opting in for a Professional account for managing production workloads and business critical dependencies. For all other activities, we recommend signing up for a Personal account.
Q: What is 'AWS account name' found on AWS sign-up page used for?
'AWS account name' is the name of your account which will show up on the AWS Management Console. It is possible to change the AWS account name later in the AWS Management Console if you choose to.
Q: Why do you need a contact address as well as a billing address while signing up?
We use your contact address to inform you about any updates to your account, new product announcements, AWS events, and any fraudulent activities that might impact your account. We use your billing address to validate your payment information and to inform you about details related to your account usage and cost.
Q: How much does AWS cost?
There is no cost for signing up with AWS and you only get charged for what you use. On creating AWS account, you get a discount called AWS Free Tier to try and experiment with the service. The pricing is calculated based on the amount of services you consume beyond the free tier limit, and once you stop using these services, there are no additional costs or termination fees.

Free Tier

Q: What is the AWS Free Tier?
The AWS Free Tier allows you to get hands-on experience with AWS Services such as Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, and Amazon RDS. The AWS Free Tier provides three types of offers. Some services are free to a certain limit, others are free for up to 12 months, and some are short term free trials, typically 30-60 days.
Q: What products/services are part of the AWS Free tier program? Which products/services are perpetual free tier offerings? Do I get access to all of them?
On signing up for an AWS account, you will have free access to over 80+ services. Some of the services like Amazon EC2, Amazon Cloudfront, Amazon S3 are free for a 12 month period, some like Amazom DynamoDB, Amazon Chime are always free, and others like Amazon Redshift, Amazon Lightsail have short term free trials, typically 30-60 days. To learn more, click here and sort by offer type (12 month, Always Free, Trials) or by Product Category.
Q: How do I ensure I don't incur charges while using Free tier?
There are a few mechanisms you can use to ensure you don't incur unexpected charges. AWS Budgets is a cost control tool that allows you to create custom cost budgets that alert you when you exceed your budgeted threshold. It sends automated Free Tier usage alerts via email to notify you if you are projected to, or actually do exceed a free tier usage limit. Learn more with this tutorial.
Q. When will my Free tier benefits expire?
Benefits for products offered as part of the 12-month free tier expire one year from your signup completion date. Benefits listed as part of the “Always Free” portion of the free tier are available every month up to their specified limit, and benefits offered for products listed as short term trials expire in the time-frame listed for each service from the date they are activated for the first time. For more Free Tier related questions, visit Free Tier FAQs.

Payment

Q: Why do I need to provide payment information, if I am signing up for Free Tier?
We ask for a credit or debit card to verify the authenticity of your account and prevent fraudulent activity. Also, we use your payment information to allow for a seamless transition to paid usage of AWS Services if your account exceeds the AWS Free Tier limits. You can find more detail here.
Q: When will I start getting charged once I create an AWS account?
You will be charged for AWS usage that exceeds the AWS Free Tier limits. We offer easy to setup Billing Alarms to monitor your AWS usage and make sure you only pay for what you want.
Q: What payment methods can I use to pay my AWS bill?
AWS accepts most major credit and debit cards. If you're an AISPL customer, you can use Visa, MasterCard, or American Express. Note: Some credit cards might require additional authorization from your bank in order to be used to pay AWS or AISPL bills. Check with the issuer of your card for more details.
Q: Will my credit/debit card get charged while signing up for an AWS account?
As part of card verification process, we will charge $1 USD (AWS) or INR 2 (AISPL) on your card when you complete the payments step. This will be refunded once your card has been validated. Your bank might take 3-5 days to reflect the refund on your account.

Identity Verification

Q: I was not able to complete the Phone Verification step due to one of the following reasons: network congestion, did not receive the phone call, phone pin verification didn't work or didn't receive the code, maximum number of failed attempts. Will I have to create an additional new account to get started?
You are not required to create a new AWS account, nor do you have to go through all the account creation steps again to complete your phone verification process. We recommend you complete signup using the username/password that you recently created your AWS account with and you will be redirected to the Phone Verification step. Initiate the Verification process again and if you continue to have problems, then try verifying your identity with a different phone number or contact us here for assistance.
Q: I do not understand the language supported in the phone verification step. How do I proceed?
Today, AWS supports English, French, German, Korean, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin (Chinese) and Portugese during the phone verification process. For all other languages that are not supported in the phone verification step, English will be the default language. We are actively working on improving the user experience for our regional customers and to reduce the friction in completing this step. If you continue to experience problems with the languages supported within the registration process, click here for assistance on completing the account creation process.
Q: I am unable to verify Captcha. How do I proceed?
We recommend to refresh image based Captcha, use audio based Captcha, or contact the support team to proceed.

Support Plan

Q: How do I decide which support plan meets my needs?

Basic plan: This support plan is offered for free to all accounts. These accounts get 24/7 access to forums and AWS resources.

Developer: With this plan, you will have email access to AWS Support during business hours with 12-hour response time for non-production systems. This plan should be used for early adoption, testing, and development.

Business: Select this plan to get support for production workloads and business critical dependencies. With Business plan, you will have 24/7 chat, phone and email access to AWS support with 1-hour response time for production systems.

 

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