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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-12T23:53:38+00:00

I signed up for Amazon AWS’s Free Tier instance. Everything works fine so far,

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I signed up for Amazon AWS’s Free Tier instance. Everything works fine so far, but I’m a bit confused how to make sure I won’t have to pay for it.

Specifically, I’ve been billed a bit for “Elastic IP address not attached to a running instance per hour on a pro rata basis”.

In the Management Console > Elastic IPs section, I have allocated a new Elastic IP and attached it to my instance. It seems that I can allocate 4 more addresses, but not attach them, this is only possible for one instance. How do I avoid being billed for unattached Elastic IPs? Is there even a way, if I have 5 Elastic IPs assigned to my account, but only have one instance?

I’m also not sure how the traffic usage reports work – I think I’m allowed “*15 GB of bandwidth out aggregated across all AWS services”, but only if I use the Public DNS and not the Elastic IP. Is this correct?

Thank you!

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Since Amazon has only limited number of IP addresses available, they charge for every unattached Elastic IP address. It’s protection against subscribers who allocate limited resources without using them, because they’re free.

    Conclusion: Allocate elastic IP addresses only for running instances, or accept that you are being billed (the charge is quite reasonable).

    You can release addresses you don’t need in EC2 Management Console.

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