Set up a project in under a minute.

Yes. The Mac app is free to download and use, with no subscription and no card needed. The tools it installs for you are free too. The only bills you could ever get are from AWS and GitHub, paid to them directly, and only for what you use. That includes the one-cent AWS request behind each cost refresh.

No. GitHub's Free plan is $0 a month, forever, and includes unlimited private repositories plus 2,000 minutes a month of automated builds and deploys (GitHub Actions). A small project's deploys use a fraction of that. You'd only pay if you choose to upgrade.

Not at the start. AWS has no monthly fee: you pay for what you use, by the request or by the second. Everything TigerSoup sets up (your accounts, the access roles, the deploy connection) costs nothing on its own. Over 30 AWS services also include a free monthly allowance that never expires. AWS Lambda, for example, gives you one million requests a month for free. A small project with little traffic often costs nothing, or close to it.

New AWS accounts get $100 in credits at sign-up and can earn up to $100 more. AWS offers a Free plan (it lasts six months or until the credits run out, then the account closes unless you upgrade) and a pay-as-you-go Paid plan. To give each project its own walled-off account, TigerSoup uses AWS Organizations, and AWS moves any account that uses Organizations onto the Paid plan, which also ends credit earning. So don't count on the sign-up credits. The always-free monthly allowances still apply, and your account never shuts down on you.

Nothing TigerSoup creates runs around the clock, so an empty project stays at $0. Each project lives in its own AWS account, and TigerSoup's menu bar shows what each one has spent this month and the pace it's on. Set a cost alert when you create a project, or later from the menu bar, and your Mac notifies you the first time spending passes your number in a month. Those alerts need TigerSoup running, and AWS can take up to a day to update its cost data, so add a budget alert in the AWS Billing console as a backstop: it takes two minutes and AWS emails you even when your Mac is off.

A few cents, billed by AWS rather than us. TigerSoup reads your spend from AWS Cost Explorer, which charges $0.01 per request, on your main AWS account. It refreshes once a day while it's running, and when you open the menu if the figures are over an hour old, so expect about 30 cents a month, a little more if you check often. Cost alerts add nothing, because they use figures already fetched. With no projects it makes no requests, and quitting TigerSoup stops them. AWS needs Cost Explorer switched on once, which TigerSoup prompts you to do, and the figures need a saved AWS sign-in rather than SSO.

No. If you can fill in a short form, you can use TigerSoup. It installs the free tools it needs, Homebrew included, with no Terminal: your Mac asks for your password once, and TigerSoup never sees it. If you don't have an AWS or GitHub account yet, it walks you through creating them, then handles the rest.

Your sign-ins are stored in your Mac's Keychain, and TigerSoup talks to AWS and GitHub directly from your Mac. The deploy connection it builds uses short-lived access instead of saved passwords or keys, so there's nothing long-lived to leak. Your cost figures and alerts stay on your Mac too.

Everything keeps working. Your cloud accounts, repository, and project files are created in your own AWS and GitHub accounts and belong to you. There's no lock-in and nothing to migrate.