When I first started building TechFootprint.io I wanted the free tier to be genuinely useful. It is easy to build a paywall and call it a product, but I wanted people to actually see the value before paying for anything. If you are running one or more AWS accounts, you should be able to understand where your money is going, how usage is changing over time, and what that means for your carbon footprint without needing to hook up spreadsheets or billing exports.

Once you sign up and add your AWS read only account details, the system starts pulling data straight from your Cost and Usage Reports. Within a few minutes you will see a dashboard that tells a story.

The Daily Cost Trends chart shows how your spending moves day to day. It smooths out the noise and helps you see when something unusual happens, such as a service scaling up unexpectedly or a reserved instance expiring. You can filter it by time range, service, region, account, or tag, and instantly see how those changes affect your costs.

The Carbon Emissions Trend takes that same data and translates it into estimated CO2 output based on AWS region energy mix and usage type. It is an easy way to see the environmental cost of your cloud usage, and to spot which regions or services might be worth optimising if you want to lower your footprint.

Cost by Service gives a clear breakdown of what you are spending on each AWS service including EC2, S3, RDS, Lambda and others. You can hover to see exact amounts, or click to focus on specific services to understand their trends.

Service Cost over Time goes a step deeper. It shows how each major service’s cost changes over your chosen time window, so you can spot gradual shifts or sudden spikes. It is one of the best ways to catch unexpected cost growth early.

Region Cost over Time does the same but grouped by AWS region. You might discover that a quiet secondary region is growing faster than expected, or that your biggest bills come from data transfer between zones rather than the compute itself.

The Top 5 Services by Cost panel gives you a quick reference of which parts of your AWS estate are driving most of the spend at any given time. It is often surprising how often the top five account for most of the total costs.

Cost per Linked Account helps when you have multiple linked or consolidated accounts. It shows how spend is distributed across them, so you can tell who is driving which portion of the bill.

Each of these charts can be filtered, viewed as raw data in a grid, and exported as a CSV file for analysis or as a PNG for sharing in reports or presentations. The goal was to make everything explorable without requiring you to learn a new tool. You just click, filter, and understand.

There is a lot of depth in the free tier. Enough to make sense of your AWS spend, spot patterns, and start connecting financial and environmental performance.

If you want to dig further, with more historical data, multiple cloud providers, and automated alerts when costs or emissions shift, that is where the Premium plan comes in. Even so, the free dashboard already gives you more insight than most paid tools.