How to check your cloud credit balance and expiry date

Checking AWS Activate credits

1. Sign in to the AWS Management Console as the root user. Credits are attached to the account, and IAM users often cannot see or redeem them.
2. Open Billing and Cost Management.
3. Select Credits in the left sidebar.

The table shows each credit grant, its type (Activate, promotional, educational), the Amount remaining column, and the expiration date. AWS documents the page in detail under AWS credits in the Billing user guide.

Newly issued credits appear within roughly 3–4 hours. If you were approved yesterday and see nothing, wait before raising a support ticket.

AWS expiry warnings

AWS emails the account's registered address automatically:

• 60 days before expiry
• 30 days before expiry
• On expiry
• At 75% of credits consumed
• At 100% consumed

These go to the root account email. If that is a founder's inbox nobody reads, the warnings are worthless — forward it to a shared alias.

Checking Google Cloud credits

1. Open the Google Cloud Console.
2. Go to Billing.
3. Choose Billing account overview — not "Payment overview", which is the common wrong turn.

The remaining promotional credit balance and its expiry appear on the overview panel. For a per-credit breakdown, open Billing → Reports and filter by credit type — Google documents this under viewing billing reports.

How long credits last

Validity is set per grant and both providers vary it. The date shown in your own console is authoritative — not any figure published elsewhere, including here.

Set up your own alerts

Provider emails tell you about credits. They do not tell you about burn rate, which is what actually kills a credit balance.

• AWS: create a Budget in Billing and Cost Management with alerts at 50%, 80% and 100% of your intended monthly spend.
• Google Cloud: Billing → Budgets & alerts, with the same thresholds. Set it against the billing account, not a single project, or workloads in other projects go unwatched.

Do this the week your credits land. A budget alert configured after the surprise is not much use.

Credits running low?

If the balance is dropping faster than planned, the fixes are usually the same handful of things — see how to make free cloud credits last longer. And if you took credits on only one provider, you may still be eligible for the other: AWS vs Google compared.