Depends what you want to get out of it. I used it for a year to host a crappy blog that got trivial amounts of traffic. It's perfectly fine for its primary use

Depends what you want to get out of it. I used it for a year to host a crappy blog that got trivial amounts of traffic. It's perfectly fine for its primary use case of getting your feet wet in the AWS ecosystem, learning what all the different features are for, and how to manage them. If you want to do any "real work" you'll blow past what the free tier offers, but that's ok with me. Yes, you can incur charges if you exceed what's covered by the free tier. Not all AWS services even have a free tier, and those that do are severely limited (1 micro instance, 5GB of S3 storage, etc). You're not off in some sandboxed environment where they just shut you down if you go over the limits. It's more like a monthly credit of $X for the first 12 months of your account. To cover my ass, I set a really low billing alert threshold. Like "email me if my monthly bill ever projects to exceed $1".