aws-exploration-credits

name	aws-exploration-credits
description	Claim AWS's new-account "exploration activities" credits (up to $100 — $20 each for EC2, Lambda, Budgets, RDS, Bedrock) at near-zero real cost via the AWS CLI, then verify and tear down. Use when the user asks to claim AWS activity credits, earn AWS free credits, complete AWS exploration activities, or check their AWS credit balance.

AWS Exploration-Activity Credit Claim

AWS accounts created after 2025-07-15 can earn $20 per activity (up to $100) by using five services once. Four of the five are automatable from the CLI; the whole run costs < $0.05 because billable resources live for minutes and are then destroyed.

Preconditions — check these first

1. Recent AWS CLI (the freetier activities API needs a mid-2025+ build): aws freetier help must work. If not: brew install awscli.
2. Working credentials with admin-ish permissions: aws sts get-caller-identity. Needs: budgets, iam (role create), lambda, ec2, rds, ssm get-parameter, bedrock-runtime invoke, freetier read.
3. Eligibility: aws freetier list-account-activities returns the five activities. Older accounts get an empty/unsupported response — stop and tell the user their account predates the program. Also check expiry: activities expire ~6 months after account creation (expiresAt on get-account-activity).
4. A region for the throwaway resources — default to the profile's configured region.

Run

scripts/claim.sh status                                   # plan state, remaining credits, activity statuses
scripts/claim.sh run --region us-east-2 --email [e-mail] # do everything + teardown billable
scripts/claim.sh cleanup