How I trained a computer vision model on the AWS Free Tier

Last updated: March 26, 2026 Developers hide Easter eggs in code. Filmmakers hide them in scenes. I hid them in AI-generated images and asked Amazon Rekognition to find them. If you've ever wondered whether AWS Free Tier gives you enough credits to build something cool, this post is for you. I built an Easter egg detector powered by Amazon Rekognition, tested its standard object detection API on 37 images, and trained a custom model, all with my AWS Free Tier credits. (If you haven't set up a Free Tier account, check out this great guide!) The idea I wanted to build a simple and fun app where I can upload a photo and have the app tell me if there's an Easter egg in it. It sounds kind of silly, but the technical problem it maps to — locating a small, specific object in a complex scene — is a foundational one for the field of computer vision. AWS has a lot of services for different AI/ML use cases, including Amazon Rekognition for computer vision. I learned that organizations like C-SPAN