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Does it take money to upload a skill in Alexa platform?

As I know that using aws lambda takes money, I am now wondering whether or not uploading skills on Alexa platform takes money. Also I am also curious that if I can 'make' some money through a skill

alexa skills kitlambda
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Ross@Amazon avatar image
Ross@Amazon answered

Hi,

There is no cost for developers to publish skills on Alexa. The free tier on AWS Lambda should be sufficient for developing basic skills. Monetizing skills is currently not allowed.

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Long haired layabout avatar image Long haired layabout commented ·

This is deliberately misleading information. Amazon have been very keen to give the impression that developing skills is free. They say that they will give you $100 credit a month however this $100 does not cover the MONTHLY CHARGE for an aws account that will be taken from you when the free trial ends. So unless you would like to pay for the privilege of entertaining amazon customers then you will need to cancel your aws account before the end of the free period. This is the situation that I now find myself in and since I have no income and have been doing this to amuse myself I will be canceling my aws account unless the issue is resolved.

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Jonathan Horniblow avatar image Jonathan Horniblow Long haired layabout commented ·

What "monthly charge for an AWS account" are you talking about? I am well outside my 12 month free trial and the $100 more than covers all my Alexa development needs, hosting, S3, dynamoDB etc. If your skill is so wildly popular (top 1%, tens of thousands of users) that you find yourself exceeding the $100 allowance, then you can apply to have it increased. What was your last charge, how much for, and what service was it for?

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Long haired layabout avatar image Long haired layabout Jonathan Horniblow commented ·

Hi turns out this was a misunderstanding. Due to an error amazon hadn't taken the charges from the AWS Credit when it came time to calculate the bill, but had used the AWS credit to remove the charges from the billing console. So I was left with money going out of my bank but no visible charges on the AWS account. (PANIC alarm) This happened to coincide with the end of the my first year of AWS usage making me think there must be a monthly charge that I just couldn't find anywhere as the usage bill showed $0.00. However this was all resolved when I queried the charge so I guess the takeaway is if you do get charged it might be an error as was my case so try not to panic and query it. I also hadn't spotted the "Expand all" button on "Bills" page in the management console without which I couldn't see what the AWS Credit was being used for. Now I know I will go easy on the dynamoDB access as I can see a few populare skills quickly exceeding the $100 allowance.

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sdfg97d5aea4-430e-413e-b6cc-8c02c45372c6 answered

it does not take money

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