[Johnny555]

A t2.large costs 10 cents/hour, a t2.medium RDS instance costs 7 cents/hour. If you put in 50 hours/month on this side project, that's $8.50 for compute plus maybe $3 for ~ 30GB of storage.

$11.50/month doesn't sound too hard to budget for.

[andrioni]

It might be more about bureaucracy than about cost. At my last job even small expenses would require printing forms and getting the CFO to sign them, so in the end it was pretty much not worth it for small tests.

[brianwawok]

Your work can't give you a few VMs in a lab somewhere that you can get free rein to prototype on? That is usually not too hard to get..

it seems the idea of the Amazon free tier is to give people a taste of AWS so they can decide to go in more or not. It's not really designed to be a free prototype for existing large customers product. Like the other poster said, you can host a tiny VM for $6 or so a month, not a big expense.

If you are asking for $4000 a month production cluster, yes that is harder to just get..