The thing that always gets me: I _think_ some of this is a solved problem within AWS. I've never used it before, but the AWS Educate "offers students no-cost

The thing that always gets me: I _think_ some of this is a solved problem within AWS. I've never used it before, but the AWS Educate "offers students no-cost access to a specified, capped amount of AWS cloud resources without requiring a credit card for payment". That sounds a lot like what I want a free tier to be. Let me play for a bit, set hard guard rails so I can't accidently spend $100, or much much worse. I mean, I can understand requiring a CC to do this, but that's mostly so I don't spin up a ton of free accounts and also so the friction to going to a paid plan is lower. It's too late for me, my personal AWS account is well outside of the free tier, but the first time I spun on a large instance to test it out I was so insanely nervous I'd screw up and end up with a huge bill. I can totally see someone else backing out at that point out of fear, but if I knew I'd hit the guardrail before spending money, even if it meant losing an instance, I'd have totally be happier to play around.