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