Is CloudFormation free to use?

CloudFormation is indeed free to use in terms of the service itself; however, any resources that you provision using CloudFormation do incur charges based on standard AWS pricing. This means that while you can create and manage your infrastructure as code without any direct fees associated with CloudFormation, you will still pay for the underlying AWS services and resources that get created through your templates.

This often leads to scenarios where users can launch multiple environments or stacks using CloudFormation, but they need to be aware that costs will accrue depending on the types of resources they deploy, such as EC2 instances, RDS databases, S3 storage, etc. Understanding this distinction is crucial for managing costs effectively while using CloudFormation in your AWS environment.