And I use their free tier and have free technical support. I can access it directly from my admin using the link in the upper right corner called Support. Click there, go to the Support Center and you can open cases all you want for free. While it does not give you the priority support and may not be able to help you with every issue, it most certainly does work and is free.

does not work for me, it says i require a plan

Weird. I just checked one of my client's accounts as well and it works for them as well.

What happens when you go to this page:

https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/

If you are logged in to your AWS account there should be a button for Select an AWS Support Plan. Choose the Basic (free). Then if you are in the AWS dashboard, in the upper right, the Support dropdown should have a link to the Support Center which allows you to open new cases.

Do you currently have any AWS services running? Maybe the free support only works if you have a service currently running. I can't see why, but that is the only reason I can think of why it may not work for you.

I have the basic plan selected.

When I go here: https://console.aws.amazon.com/support/home?region=us-east-1...

and choose technical support. the textarea for the support question disappears.

It says this: At the Basic Support level, you can create account and billing support cases and service limit increase requests, but you cannot create technical support cases. For information about features and pricing of support plans that include technical support cases, one-on-one technical assistance, and additional support resources, see AWS Support.

This is rather surprising as there are many basic technical support questions that should be resolved without a 50 fee.

Oh, got you. I thought you weren't seeing anything for support. Yes, you are right technical support isn't available under the free plan. However, I have used the Account and Billing Support questions for basic technical questions. For more technical questions their forums have worked well for me in the past.

They phased it out a while ago:

http://techcrunch.com/2013/11/12/amazon-dynamodb-serves-tril...

AWS SimpleDB has not been in the console for a very long time. Look at the API docs. I think you can still use it.

Edit: I'm pretty sure they are pushing people away from SimpleDB to Dynamo.