New programme offers AWS promotional credits for developers to put toward their Alexa skill

Tens of thousands of developers already building skills for Alexa

Luxembourg—15th March 2017—Amazon today announced a new programme that will make it free for tens of thousands of Alexa developers to build and host most Alexa skills using Amazon Web Services (AWS). Many Alexa skill developers currently take advantage of the AWS Free Tier, which offers one million AWS Lambda requests and up to 750 hours of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) compute time per month at no charge. However, if developers exceed the AWS Free Tier limits, they may incur AWS usage fees each month.

Now, developers with a published Alexa skill can apply to receive a $100 AWS promotional credit and can receive an additional $100 per month in AWS promotional credits if they incur AWS usage charges for their skill—making it free for developers to build and host most Alexa skills.

“There is already a large community of incredibly engaged developers building skills for Alexa,” said Steve Rabuchin, Vice President, Amazon Alexa. “Today, we’re excited to announce a new programme that will free up developers to create more robust and unique skills that can take advantage of AWS services. We can’t wait to see what developers create for Alexa.”

Ryan Kroonenburg is a UK-based Solutions Architect and the founder of A Cloud Guru, a training community on AWS, which just introduced courses on creating Alexa skills. “Developers already know that building for Alexa is free using AWS Free Tier with AWS Lambda, but what they can’t plan for is how successful their skill will be,” said Ryan Kroonenburg. “This programme not only allows developers to create robust skills that use AWS services without worrying about costs, but also ensures that popular skills that hit more than one million calls per month are cost effective to maintain. It’s a big benefit for the Alexa skill developer community.”

Developers can visit developer.amazon.com/alexa to apply for this programme and learn more about building and hosting skills using the Alexa Skills Kit and AWS.

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