AWS Now Gives You a Free Sandbox Account - No Credit Card, No Cost, 8 Hours to Build (2026)

AWS just announced free Sandbox environments which lets any AWS Builder Center user to provision time limited free AWS account without any credit card, personal account or any sort of cost involved. ABSOLUTELY FREE!!!

In this short blog i will walk through how you can use Sandbox Account and start learning on AWS Absolutely free through Workshops in just 5 steps.

Don't miss the important caveats around Sandbox environment in the last section.

Step 1 Log in to Builder Center

• Log into Builder Center.

Note: You need to have AWS Builder Center Account in order to access Free Sandbox AWS Account.

Step 2 Access Workshops for Sandbox Env

• In order to access sandbox AWS Account, you need to navigate to Workshops

• You can choose which category, level, type of workshop based on your preference under Discover

Step 3 Choose Workshops

• Once you selected your choice of workshop, click on Request free sandbox environment

Note: At a time you can only choose 1 Workshop as Sandbox environment is limited to 1 at a time

• In my case i chose Building and scaling Agentic AI workflows

• Click on Request

• You will get 2 notification of environment being prepared and when it is ready to use.

Step 4 Accessing workshop

• Under Your Workshops click on Go to Free sandbox environment

• Complete the steps of joining workshop (accept the terms), you will be asked for email or builder center ID to recieve a code

Step 5 Access AWS Account through Console

• Once you recieve code for workshop, you will see workshop screen, explaining about the workshop and how to proceed with workshop like actual building steps like clicking on Lab 1 to explain different modules

• And from there you can access the AWS account through Console

Step 6 Go build on AWS

• Once you are inside AWS console, you can follow the steps mentioned in the workshop and start learning and building on AWS

• You can see resources are already created for you in your account for the workshop. This happened while account was being prepared

Few things to Note about sandbox accounts

• At the time of launch you can only create, read, modify and delete resources mentioned in the workshop
• Account permissions are scoped only to those resources
• Your AWS account is time-boxed to 8 hours, starting from when the environment is prepared
• One sandbox environment per week limit: You can request 1 sandbox environment per week. The weekly limit resets every Sunday.

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