Use the free offer that fits you, set a budget alert before you create anything, tag every resource, build and destroy your labs with code, and run a five-minute check for the usual culprits, such as NAT gateways, load balancers, databases and public IPs, before you close your laptop.
What people tell me
I want to learn cloud properly, not just watch videos, but I am scared of opening an account. I have read posts from students who left something running and got a bill bigger than a month's pocket money, and I am not even sure which of the free offers to pick or whether I need a card. I would like to practise building real things on AWS, Azure or Google Cloud without that risk hanging over me.
A composite of the messages behind this question, with personal details left out.
Key takeaways
- Pick the free offer that matches you, and read its end conditions before signing up.
- Set a budget with email alerts at small amounts before creating anything; it warns you, it does not stop anything.
- Tag every resource and build labs with infrastructure as code so you can destroy everything in one command.
- Know the usual surprise costs: NAT gateways, load balancers, databases, public IPs, disks, snapshots and logs.
- Protect the account itself with MFA and never put access keys in code or Git.
The short version
Fear of a bill is a good instinct, but it should not stop you practising. Cloud bills are predictable once you know where they come from, and the habits that keep a student account at zero are exactly the habits companies want from a cloud engineer. Here is the setup I recommend.
1. Pick the right free offer
The terms change, so always read the official page first. As of September 2026:
| Cloud | Offer | What happens at the end |
|---|---|---|
| AWS | New accounts get 100 USD in credits and can earn up to 100 USD more, for up to 200 USD over 6 months, on a free plan limited to select services. | On the free plan there are no charges unless you upgrade to a paid plan; the account closes after 6 months or when credits run out. |
| Azure | The free account gives 200 USD of credit for 30 days plus 12 months of select free services. Azure for Students gives full-time university students 100 USD for 12 months with no credit card. | The free account has a spending limit; to continue after 30 days or once the credit is used, you move to pay-as-you-go, which removes the limit. |
| Google Cloud | 300 USD of welcome credit over 90 days, plus an always-free tier such as one e2-micro VM a month in us-west1, us-central1 or us-east1. | If you do not upgrade, the trial billing account closes and its resources stop. |
The dangerous moment is not the free period. It is the day you upgrade, because after that everything beyond the free limits is billed.
2. Set a budget before anything else
Create a budget with email alerts at small amounts, such as 5 and 10 USD. On all three clouds a budget is an alarm, not a brake: it tells you, it does not switch anything off. That is still enough, because most surprise bills are one forgotten resource that an alert would catch within a day.
3. Lock the account
Turn on MFA for the root or owner login, create a separate identity for daily work, and never put access keys in code. Keys pushed to public GitHub repositories get found by automated bots within minutes, and the attacker's mining machines go on your bill.
4. Tag everything and build with code
Give every resource tags such as project, env and owner. Better still, write your labs in Terraform, Bicep or CloudFormation. Then cleaning up is one destroy command instead of a hunt through the console, and you learn infrastructure as code for free.
5. Know the usual culprits
Most student bills come from the same list: NAT gateways and load balancers left running, public IPv4 addresses (AWS charges for every one), managed databases, stopped VMs whose disks and snapshots are still stored, data sent out to the internet, and logs kept forever. Before you close your laptop, check those. It takes five minutes.
Where to go next
The cloud engineering roadmap puts billing and budgets in its second stage, before you build anything, and the cloud engineering cheat sheet has the free offers and cost traps for each cloud on one page. If you want a project that is built around exactly this problem, look at student cloud sandboxes with budgets and automatic cleanup. The free Google Skills labs and the sandboxes in Microsoft Learn's Azure Fundamentals training also let you practise in temporary environments you do not pay for. More answers are in the questions library.
If you want help setting up your first account safely, create a free account and start the roadmap, or book a session and we can go through it together.
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