AWS Lightsail Free Tier 2026 — 3 Months Free, But the Burst Credit Gotcha Is Real

Free Tier Details — The Full Picture

Amazon built Lightsail as the “simple VPS” on-ramp into the AWS ecosystem. The free tier is the bait. Three months of free infrastructure that plugs you into S3, CloudFront, Route 53, and a dozen other services where the real bills come from. The VPS is a gateway drug, and it is a very effective one.

• Eligibility: New AWS accounts only. Existing AWS accounts with previous Lightsail usage are excluded, no exceptions.
• Duration: 3 calendar months from the date you launch your first Lightsail instance, not from account creation.
• Covered plan: Only the $5/mo Nano Linux/Unix instance (2 burstable vCPU, 512MB RAM, 20GB SSD, 1TB transfer).
• Total value: $15 (3 × $5/mo). The smallest free offer among major cloud providers by a wide margin.
• CPU type: Burstable. 5% baseline with credit-based bursting. This is the detail that changes everything.
• Credit card required: Yes. $1 verification hold, refunded within 3–5 days.
• Auto-billing: Starts automatically on day 91 at $5/mo. AWS sends no advance warning. You must delete the instance proactively.

They also throw in a free month of Lightsail managed databases ($15/mo plan) and 5GB of object storage. The ecosystem lock-in starts immediately. First the VPS is free. Then the database is free. Then your architecture depends on three AWS services and migrating away requires re-engineering your entire stack. Amazon perfected this playbook a decade ago, and it still works.

The Burst Credit System — The Gotcha Nobody Warns You About

This is the section that justifies writing this article. Every Lightsail “deal” page on the internet says “2 vCPU, 512MB RAM, free for 3 months” and stops there. Nobody explains what “2 vCPU burstable” actually means in practice. Let me fix that.

The $5 Nano plan has a 5% CPU baseline. That means your server is guaranteed access to 5% of one processor core at all times. When you need more, it borrows from a credit bank — credits that accumulate while the CPU sits below the 5% baseline. When the credits run out, your CPU is hard-capped at 5%. No gradual degradation. No warning. One moment your application responds in 200ms, the next it takes 4 seconds.

Here is what that looks like in practice:

I ran a basic Express.js application with a PostgreSQL connection on the Nano plan. Normal response times: 180ms. After running a npm audit fix that pegged the CPU for 20 minutes, my credit bank drained far enough that the server was throttled for the next 18 hours. An 18-hour slowdown from a 20-minute maintenance task. That is the burst credit system in action.

How to monitor credits: Open the Lightsail console, click your instance, go to the Metrics tab, and look at the CPU burst capacity graph. If the blue line trends downward throughout the day, you are spending credits faster than you earn them. This graph is the single most important diagnostic tool on the Nano plan, and most users never look at it.

The $10/mo Small plan has a 10% baseline and the $20/mo Medium has a 20% baseline. Every tier up buys you more sustained CPU headroom. But none of them are free. For comparison, Vultr’s $5/mo plan gives you dedicated CPU allocation — no credit system, no throttling, consistent performance regardless of usage pattern. The burst system is how Amazon can say “2 vCPU” on a $5 plan while only guaranteeing you 5% of one core.

How to Claim the Free Trial

1. Create a new AWS account at aws.amazon.com. You need an email address, phone number, and credit card. AWS verifies identity with a small temporary hold.
2. Navigate to Lightsail from the AWS Console. Search “Lightsail” or go directly to lightsail.aws.amazon.com. The Lightsail console is entirely separate from the main AWS console.
3. Create a new instance. Select your preferred AWS region. For US users, us-east-1 (Virginia) and us-west-2 (Oregon) are the most popular. Choose Linux/Unix and the $5/mo Nano plan specifically.
4. Choose a blueprint. Options include bare OS (Amazon Linux 2023, Ubuntu 22.04, Debian 12) or pre-configured stacks (WordPress, LAMP, Node.js, Nginx). Pick the bare OS if you want control; use blueprints for quick deploys.
5. Launch and verify the free tag. Deployment takes under 2 minutes. The dashboard should confirm “First 3 months free” on your instance card. If it does not, you selected the wrong plan or your account is ineligible.
6. Set up billing alerts immediately. Go to the AWS Billing console, create a CloudWatch billing alarm for $1. This catches any accidental charges from Lightsail extras (snapshots, static IPs) or other AWS services you might accidentally trigger.
7. Set a calendar reminder for day 85. Subject line: “DELETE LIGHTSAIL OR PAY $5/MO.” Five days of buffer to decide whether to keep it or move on.

Ten minutes total from signup to running server. The Lightsail interface is intentionally the friendliest experience in all of AWS — Amazon built it specifically for people who find the EC2 console terrifying. It works. But simplicity is not the same as transparency. The burst credit system is not explained anywhere during the signup flow.

What You Actually Get for Free

Let me be blunt about what $5/mo (or $0 for 3 months) buys you in 2026:

512MB of RAM in 2026 is survival-mode territory. A basic Ubuntu 22.04 install with systemd, journald, and sshd consumes ~180MB at idle. That leaves 330MB for your application, which sounds workable until you realize MySQL alone wants 200MB. A static site generator, a lightweight Go API, or a simple reverse proxy — those fit. Anything involving a database on the same box? You will swap to disk, and the 20GB SSD has limited IOPS that make swap performance miserable.

The honest comparison: DigitalOcean’s $6/mo Droplet gives you 1GB RAM and 25GB SSD with dedicated CPU. Vultr’s $5/mo plan gives you 1GB RAM and 25GB NVMe. Both cost the same or less than Lightsail after the free trial ends, and neither uses burst credits. Lightsail used to be price-competitive. After recent price increases across the tiers, you are now paying a premium for AWS integration, not for the server itself.

The AWS Ecosystem Pull — Why the Free Tier Exists

Amazon is not giving you a free server out of generosity. They are giving you a free server because it is the cheapest way to connect you to the AWS ecosystem, where the real revenue comes from. Understand this, and you can use the deal strategically instead of getting used by it.

• Amazon S3: Offload static assets, backups, and media files. Direct VPC peering means fast internal transfers at no additional network cost. S3 itself charges for storage and requests, but the first 5GB and 20,000 GET requests/month are free-tier eligible.
• Amazon Route 53: Enterprise DNS with 100% uptime SLA. Manage DNS directly from the Lightsail dashboard. $0.50/hosted zone/month after the initial zone — cheap and reliable.
• Amazon CloudFront: CDN with 450+ edge locations globally. Lightsail distributions integrate directly. 1TB of data transfer is free-tier eligible for 12 months.
• AWS Certificate Manager: Free SSL/TLS certificates. Automatic renewal. Integrates with Lightsail load balancers out of the box.
• VPC Peering: Connect your Lightsail instance to your broader AWS VPC for access to RDS, ElastiCache, Lambda, SQS, and the full AWS service catalog. This is where the ecosystem lock-in really begins.

If your project will eventually need S3 for file storage, CloudFront for CDN, or Route 53 for DNS, Lightsail is genuinely the cheapest on-ramp. Zero dollars for 90 days of integrated access. Vultr and DigitalOcean have their own object storage and CDN products, but the breadth of AWS services is unmatched. The trade-off is that once your architecture depends on three or four AWS services, the migration cost to leave becomes a serious engineering project. Amazon knows this. It is the entire strategy, and it has been working for fifteen years.

Auto-Billing Gotchas & Hidden Costs

AWS billing surprises are so common they have become a meme in developer communities. Lightsail is simpler than most AWS products, but it still has traps that will cost you money if you are not paying attention. I have personally seen each of these happen:

• Auto-billing at day 91: Your instance converts to paid at $5/mo with zero advance warning. AWS does not send an email saying “your free period is ending.” You must track the date yourself and either delete the instance or accept the charges.
• Detached static IPs: Creating a static IP and then deleting the instance (or detaching the IP) triggers a charge of $0.005/hour ($3.60/mo) for the idle IP. AWS bills for idle IPs to discourage IPv4 hoarding. Always delete static IPs you are not actively using.
• Snapshot storage: Manual snapshots cost $0.05/GB/month. A snapshot of a full 20GB Nano disk costs $1/mo. Snapshots persist after instance deletion — you must manually delete them. I have seen people paying $3–5/mo for orphaned snapshots they forgot about.
• Transfer overages: The Nano plan includes 1TB of outbound transfer. Exceeding it costs $0.09/GB. For most small projects this is unlikely, but a misconfigured CDN pull zone or a download-heavy application could trigger a surprise bill.
• Only the $5 Nano plan is free: All higher plans ($7 Micro, $10 Small, $20 Medium) are charged from day one if selected during the free trial period. This catches people who read “3 months free” and assume it applies to any plan.
• Lightsail databases and load balancers: The free database trial is only 1 month (not 3). Load balancers cost $18/mo. These extras are not covered by the 3-month VPS free tier.

What I actually do: Google Calendar event on day 85 with the subject “DELETE LIGHTSAIL INSTANCE OR PAY $5/MO FOREVER.” The all-caps works. On that day, spend 10 minutes asking yourself: is the AWS integration worth $5/mo, or would a dedicated developer VPS give you more resources for the same money? Either answer is fine. The wrong answer is forgetting to ask the question.

Lightsail vs Other Free Trials

By raw dollar value, Lightsail’s $15 is embarrassingly modest compared to Google Cloud’s $300 or even DigitalOcean’s $200. But Lightsail has something unique: 90 consecutive days on a single plan with fixed pricing. No per-hour billing anxiety, no surprise resource charges, no complex cost calculators. That simplicity has genuine value. If you need duration and predictability over raw credit, Lightsail wins. If you need to test expensive configurations or run multiple servers, DigitalOcean and Google Cloud give you far more spending room.

Want to stack multiple trials? See our free VPS trials guide for a strategy that gets you months of free infrastructure across providers.

Who Should Actually Use This Free Trial

After running through the burst credits, the billing gotchas, and the comparison math, here is my honest assessment of who benefits from this trial and who is wasting their time:

The burst credit system is not a dealbreaker — it is a design constraint. Work within it and you get 90 days of free, well-integrated infrastructure. Fight against it and you get a frustrating experience that makes you hate AWS before you have given it a fair chance. Know which camp you fall into before signing up.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are Lightsail burst credits and how do they work?

Lightsail burst credits are a CPU currency. The $5 Nano plan has a 5% baseline CPU allocation and earns credits when idle. When your app needs full CPU power, it spends those credits. Once the credit bank is empty, your instance gets hard-throttled to the 5% baseline — roughly 50MHz of usable CPU on a 1GHz core. A WordPress site that takes 200ms to load normally can take 4 seconds when throttled. Credits regenerate over 24 hours of low usage, but a single traffic spike can drain them in minutes.

Does the Lightsail free tier require a credit card?

Yes. AWS requires a valid credit or debit card to create an account. A $1 verification hold is placed and refunded within 3–5 days. There is no way to use the free tier without a payment method on file. If you are worried about unexpected charges, set a CloudWatch billing alarm for $1 immediately after account creation.

What happens after the 3-month free period ends?

Your Lightsail Nano instance automatically converts to paid billing at $5/mo. AWS does not delete your instance or send a pre-charge warning email. The charge appears on your next AWS bill. To avoid charges, delete the instance before the free period expires. Set a calendar reminder for day 85 to give yourself a buffer.

How long does it take for burst credits to regenerate?

The Nano plan earns credits at a rate that refills the bank in approximately 24 hours of low CPU usage (below 5% baseline). If your instance sustains 20% CPU for several hours, the bank can drain completely. Monitor the CPU burst capacity graph in the Lightsail Metrics tab — it is the single most important diagnostic for this plan.

Can I use the Lightsail free tier for WordPress?

Technically yes — Lightsail has a WordPress blueprint. Practically, the Nano plan’s 512MB RAM is too small. WordPress plus MySQL plus PHP consumes 400–500MB at idle. The realistic minimum is the $7/mo Micro plan (1GB RAM), which is not free. For WordPress hosting, Hostinger gives you 4GB RAM at $6.49/mo, or DigitalOcean gives you 1GB at $6/mo — both without burst credit restrictions.

Is Lightsail better than Vultr or DigitalOcean for a simple VPS?

For raw VPS performance per dollar, no. Vultr’s $5/mo plan gives you 1GB RAM with dedicated CPU — no burst credits, no throttling. DigitalOcean’s $6/mo Droplet gives you 1GB RAM and 25GB SSD. Lightsail’s advantage is native AWS ecosystem access: S3, CloudFront, Route 53, VPC peering. If you need those services, Lightsail is the cheapest entry point. If you just need a Linux box, traditional providers offer more for less.

Can I upgrade during the free trial without losing data?

You cannot directly resize a Lightsail instance. The process: create a snapshot, launch a new larger instance from that snapshot. Data carries over. However, the larger instance is charged immediately — only the $5 Nano plan is free. The snapshot itself costs $0.05/GB/month in storage, so delete it after migration.

How does Lightsail compare to Google Cloud and Azure free trials?

By dollar value, Lightsail is the smallest offer: $15 total. Google Cloud gives $300 for 90 days plus an always-free e2-micro. Azure gives $200 for 30 days plus a free B1s for 12 months. But Lightsail offers the simplest billing experience — fixed pricing with no per-hour surprises. Maximum free credit: Google Cloud. Minimum billing anxiety: Lightsail.