Are You Struggling With Amazon Bedrock’s Ultra-Low Quotas on New AWS Accounts? 🤯
Are you hitting painfully low rate limits when running LLMs on Amazon Bedrock from a newly created AWS account? You’re definitely not alone — many developers are discovering that new accounts often start with extremely restrictive quotas, sometimes as low as 2 requests per minute.
Official guidance usually suggests contacting an account manager to escalate your limits, but for startups, hobby projects, or personal experimentation, that path is far from simple.
New Account? Big Ambitions, Tiny Quota 🤏🚧
Since 2024 or maybe 2025, AWS quietly adjusted Bedrock’s default model access for newly created accounts - together with other lower account defaults such as a maximum concurreny of 10 for AWS Lambda. Even when using global endpoints, many fresh accounts get just a few requests per minute (e.g., 2 rpm for Claude 4.5 Sonnet). This severely slows down prototyping or early-stage AI development.
Meanwhile, older AWS accounts — even ones that never touched Bedrock before — often start with dramatically higher limits, approaching 200+ rpm for the exact same models.
This creates a real operational advantage for teams with access to aged accounts.
The Elder Account Advantage 🕰️✨
AWS appears to apply significantly stricter defaults to newer accounts while preserving far more permissive limits for older ones. This aligns with AWS’s long-standing pattern of maintaining stable experiences for long-time customers.
In practice, a dormant but years-old AWS account can immediately receive much higher Bedrock limits purely due to its age.
Below is a striking example: 3 rpm for new accounts vs 250 rpm for older accounts on Claude 4.5 Opus.
Why AWS Is Unlikely to Reduce Older Accounts’ Limits 🔒🏢
Reducing quotas for older accounts would create major risk and break expectations for long-standing customers — especially enterprises.
- Many organizations have stable, long-lived workloads.
- Retroactively lowering quotas could break pipelines and violate performance assumptions.
- AWS historically avoids backward-incompatible changes unless absolutely necessary.
Because of this, it’s unlikely AWS will apply newer, stricter defaults to older accounts. Teams spinning up new AWS accounts face a much steeper ramp for experimenting with Bedrock.
Finding and Reusing Older AWS Accounts 🔎📦
If your organization has older AWS accounts lying around, they may offer instant scaling advantages. With the new AWS Organizations Direct Account Transfer feature, accounts can move between Organizations without removing payment methods or performing the old, painful detachment workflow.
When moving such accounts, remember to update:
- Legal entity name
- Root user email
- Addresses and billing contacts
- Tax information
If your organization uses Trusted Access for AWS Account Management, these updates are straightforward. Also make sure to audit the account for any leftover resources before dedicating it to GenAI workloads.
Why New Accounts? Why Not Run Everything in One AWS Account? 🧩💼
Putting Bedrock experiments, different production services, and dev workloads into a single account sounds convenient — until it isn’t. Combining everything into one single AWS Account creates unnecessary risk and operational noise.
Isolation Protects You 🔥🧱
Account boundaries are AWS’s strongest safety net. One bad experiment or IAM mistake shouldn’t touch production. Isolation limits accidental data access, cost spikes, and incident blast radius.Governance Stays Clean 📜✨
Different workloads need different controls. Separate accounts keep audits simpler, give clear ownership, and let you apply SCPs and guardrails without compromise.Costs Stay Transparent 💸📊
Mixing Bedrock prototyping with core services muddies cost reporting. Individual accounts let you track usage, set budgets, and avoid team-to-team disputes.Experiments Move Faster ⚡🔬
A sandbox (ideally an older account with higher limits) lets you test models, tweak IAM, and push boundaries freely — without risking production stability.It Matches AWS Best Practices 🏗️📚
AWS recommends multi-account setups for lifecycle separation and blast-radius control. Using older accounts for Bedrock while keeping core workloads isolated follows this playbook perfectly.
How to Break Free From Bedrock’s Slow Lane 🚀💡
- Identify older AWS accounts that haven't been used recently.
- Transfer them into your AWS Organization using the streamlined Direct Account Transfer workflow.
- Update all account metadata for compliance.
- Deploy your Bedrock workloads — and unlock higher default limits instantly.
This approach helps teams accelerate their AI development journey despite the strict constraints placed on newly created AWS accounts.
Have you seen similar quota differences in your environment? Share your experience — more data points help the community understand the pattern! 🙌
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