AWS closed my account when the free plan expired — is my S3 data and RDS snapshot gone?

There is a window and you are almost certainly inside it. Do not do anything else until you have used it.

Per AWS's free tier FAQ: when the free plan expires the account is closed, but the data is retained for 90 days, and you can restore access by upgrading to a paid plan within that period. After the 90 days it is permanently erased.

So: upgrade to the paid plan now, today, before you finish reading this thread. Then, once you can see the resources again, get the data out first and make the architectural decisions second. People do this in the other order, get distracted by tidying up, and burn a week of their window.

Flagging a piece of folklore that circulates on this exact topic: "account closed means the data is already deleted". It is not what AWS documents — the documented behaviour is 90 days of retention with restoration by upgrading to a paid plan.

This matters because the panic reaction to believing it is to immediately create a fresh account and start rebuilding, which is the one move that guarantees you never recover the original. Check the actual policy, then act.

Also worth reading the closure email properly rather than skimming it. It states the dates.

Once you are out of the hole, fix the thing that put you in it: your backups lived inside the account that could be closed.

What that looks like in practice — an aws s3 sync on a schedule to somewhere that is not AWS, or at minimum a different account under a different payer. For RDS, export the snapshot to S3 and sync that down too; a snapshot sitting in RDS in the account under threat is not a backup of anything, it is the same egg in the same basket.

The rule that generalises: a backup that shares a failure domain with the thing it is backing up — same account, same payment method, same login — is a copy, not a backup.

What I did after mine, for what it is worth: moved to the paid plan on day one and mentally reclassified the credits as a discount rather than a countdown.

The entire problem with a free plan that ends is that it creates a cliff on a date you will not be thinking about. On a paid plan with credits applied there is no cliff — the balance drains, the bill starts, and the alerting you have already set catches it. Same money, no single night where everything can disappear.

Specifically for the RDS snapshot: get it off RDS entirely while you have access. Export the snapshot to S3, then pull it down locally or push it to different storage.

Restoring a snapshot you actually hold into a fresh account is an afternoon of moderately dull work. Not having the snapshot at all is a project with no defined end. The gap between those two outcomes is about twenty minutes of effort today.

Closed accounts can be reopened by support for up to a year, so there is no rush. Just open a case and they will sort it out.