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A slide from an Alexa presentation at CES in Las Vegas this year.

Amazon Web Services will offer $100 in promotional creditand upto an additional $100/monthto cover any extra cloud computing and storage costs incurred bythird-party developerswhose Alexa skills exceed the limits of the existing AWS Free Tier.

The company says the move will make it free for developers to build and host most Alexa skills.

Amazonsnew program, announced this morning, is the latest collaboration betweentheAlexa and AWS teams inside the company, designed to further boost the development of new capabilitiesfor the voice-enabled virtual assistant. Alexa powers devices including Amazons own Echo smart speakers.

Skills are the equivalent of apps, allowingAlexa to deliver additionalonline services, featuresand information. Amazon announced last month that more than 10,000 Alexa skills have been developed by outside developers.The new AWS program is an indication that usage of Alexa is starting to exceed the limits of the existing AWS Free Tier. Here is Amazons description of the new program.

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 earn 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.

Strong sales of the Echo lineup have helpedAmazon jumped out to an early lead in the home over rival virtual assistants from companies including Microsoft, Google and Apple. In addition, Alexa is available in a growing number of third-party hardware devices.

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Amazon Web Services starts offering free cloud storage and ... - GeekWire