Should I be concerned about fees for Ask Alexa or Echosistent?

SmartApps & Automations
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Dear Amazon Web Services Customer,

Thank you for using Amazon Web Services. The AWS Free Tier includes service offers that are only available for 12 months following your AWS sign up date, as well as additional service offers that do not automatically expire at the end of your 12 month AWS Free Tier term. We wanted to let you know that the AWS Free Tier for service offers limited to the 12 month introductory period is set to expire on June 30, 2017 for account 153601386435.

For those service offers with a 12 month introductory AWS Free Tier, your resources will continue to run once your AWS Free Tier has ended, but you will begin to be charged at the standard, pay-as-you-go service rates for the following services: Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, Amazon RDS, Amazon CloudFront, Amazon AppStream, AWS Data Pipeline, Amazon EBS, Amazon ElastiCache, Elastic Load Balancing, Amazon SES, Amazon API Gateway, Amazon ES, and Amazon ECR.

For those service offers that do not expire at the end of your 12 month AWS Free Tier term, they will remain free within their Free Usage Tier limits. These services include Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Cognito, AWS CodeCommit, Amazon Simple Workflow Service, Amazon SQS, Amazon SNS, Amazon Elastic Transcoder, Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon Mobile Analytics, AWS Key Management Service, AWS Lambda, and AWS CodePipeline.

We also have an introductory free trial for AWS Device Farm. The AWS Device Farm free trial is not impacted by the 12 month introductory period, and expires when you use up your free trial device testing minutes.

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The long answer… No, nothing to worry about at all.

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The longer answer is that I have used this extensively over the past year and a half and I have been charged one penny, and that was a round up error. Ask Alexa and other apps use the Lamba service, which is ‘fundamentally’ free. This means if you use 1 million calls to your device over a month you would get a bill. Doing ‘math’ you could only do 3 million calls per month, and that is if you stayed up all day and night and was quick on your question/answers. Bottom line, if you get charged for your Lambda sessions as a direct result of Ask Alexa, let me know and I will pay your bill (certain restrictions apply ;))

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Never say Never though. Amazon did end its unlimited cloud storage this week.

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