You don’t need Claude. I use codex-cli daily with my $20 a month ChatGPT subscription and never approached any limits.

AWS has a real Fred tier now as of 6/2025 where you get a $100 credit in addition to the other free stuff - Lambda up to a certain limit every month, free EC2 hours etc.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/awsaccountbilling/latest/aboutv2...

But be careful. If you don’t know what you’re doing, AWS can bite you in the ass. What type of resources do you need to spin up on AWS?

More context: I was a 60% Data Engineer and 40% back eng engineer.

The job ads now ask for cloud computing, I did on-perm with similar components but built in house.

Step Functions Glue Athena S3 RDS

Databrick GCP Snowflake

I am looking at ways to 'modernize' 'cloudifly' myself

This is chatgpt suggestions: Step 3: Your FIRST project (this is the breakthrough) Project: “Cloud Data Pipeline” (must-do) What you build: Pull financial data (API) Store in S3 Process with Python Schedule with Airflow Load into warehouse (Redshift or PostgreSQL) Architecture (simple) API → Python → S3 → Airflow → DB → (optional dashboard)

If you are just experimenting, the free tiers on AWS and GCP can go a long way if you keep things small. I have also seen people get credits through hackathons or startup programs, so that is worth checking too.

The university I work with offers claude free to students. If you had a class you wanted to take perhaps there might be a similar opportunity