For what it's worth, I am a user of this and I'd like to clear up one thing that is not obvious here:
There are actually two tiers of Free here that Oracle offers.
Always Free - No credit card required, sign up. This is what the new limit applies to
PAYG - You give a credit card, but like AWS and GCP there is a "free" tier for people who are on pay as you go plans. From what I can tell, the PAYG subscribers are not subject to this lower limit, only Always Free users.
In other words, if you want the old provisioning limits for free you just have to put your credit card info in.
There are additional reasons that you would want to switch to PAYG - for instance, oracle will literally tear down your always free resources if you are idling them, they are watching CPU and memory and if they see them idled they will take them away. Also, even provisioning always free instances is a challenge - most people have to write bots that attempt on a regular basis, since they appear to only allow you to register when existing resources are freed up, either by the reaper referenced earlier or by someone deprovisioning their always free resources. Neither of these limitations apply on the PAYG tier
It's worth clearing up, because this amount of free resources is worth a nonzero amount of money, if you provisioned comparable resources on any of the tier 1 or tier 2 cloud's you would be paying well over $1k/year for what they are handing over for free. AWS + GCP free compute offerings are anemic in comparison. It's a significant amount of compute.
> Always Free - No credit card required, sign up. This is what the new limit applies to
I don't think this is true.
I just tried to sign up and it says
----
Payment/Identity Verification - You will not be charged
You won’t be charged for using OCI Free Tier. If you choose to upgrade your account to Paid tier, you will only be charged for services used over your Always Free limits. If you don’t upgrade your account to Paid tier, you will continue to have access to Always Free services.
You may see a small, temporary charge on your payment method. This is a verification hold that will be removed automatically. See the FAQ for more information.
We recommend double-checking all the information before submitting the form since some info is automatically filled.
Oracle does not accept any virtual, prepaid or single use cards in payment verification.
Debit cards that have a logo (for example, Visa, Mastercard, Discover, American Express) and don't require a PIN number can be used to sign up for a free Oracle Cloud Account.
Yep. It's NOT possible to sign up OCI without a payment method now. I signed up late last month and observed the same.
Additionally, it's next to impossible to spin up a free instance even if you provision it under the limit. Every single availability zone in the U.S. have all been constantly "emitting out of capacity" errors for free tier resource allocation. Ironically, if you provisioning beyond the free tier, they are ALL success.
So it looks like Oracle shawdow banned the free tier (or only allow a fixed set of free tier resources that are completely saturated all the time (unless someone spin down their free tier instances).
The amount of abuse of free VMs must be absolutely immense even with credit card verification. I’m not sure there needs to be additional secret motives.
The real problem is that humans hear terms like "always" and assume "always" means "always". The things in marketing love to take advantage of this. (see also: unlimited).
I was under the impression that PAYG accounts having access to the old provisioning limits is still very ambiguous. This article (https://www.infoq.com/news/2026/07/oracle-cloud-free-tier-li...) mentioned by another commenter also mentions that it's still very much in the air.
Though I can also confirm the provisioning behavior for PAYG vs. trial accounts w/o payment info.
Did "always free" ever really work? When I set mine up months ago, the advice was use PAYG with free tier, because Always Free would always report it had no capacity available. Sure enough, I tested it and this was true at the time.
Trick is to make a bit larger instance, then scale it down to the always free limits - or so I've heard. You might pay a small amount, but totally worth it. That Arm server with 4 oCPU, 24GB, 200GB SSD is a beast, I've had it since 2022.
Btw make sure you crank up the SSD speed all the way, as long as it is in the always free limit, you won't be charged for it ... Even though it says you will.
I did not try for long, but I was also never able to actually provision, this was a couple years ago when I tried, the only people I saw report success were using the scripted methodology to periodically attempt I mentioned in grandparent comment.
It has for me. I've had several permanent Arm-VPSes running in OCI for almost 4 years, without paying a single cent. But I'm on a paid tenancy, by having provided a verified payment card, which I think is the distinction that the OP is trying to describe.
A "free tenancy" has limitations: e.g. your provisioned Free(tm) resources can suddenly be yoinked in order to satisfy an allocation from a user who's in a paid tenancy, even if that allocation also fits inside their Free(tm) envelope and ends up costing $0.00/mo. Simply put, the "paying" customers have dibs, even on free stuff.
I did actually once claim a completely free instance without payment info. It can be done but you're best off using a script, or just sticking to the free limits on a PAYG plan
They'll clean up instances that aren't doing enough for them to notice, even -- I used to run an XMPP server on one, used daily but not with many users, and they kept shutting it down at random multi-day intervals with little warning. Stopped using it.
Some people say that doesn't apply to PAYG users, I do not know about that for sure, I am a PAYG user since 2021 and have not experienced any reclamation issues.
I use mine as a reverse proxy for accessing my home plex via tailscale and a few other small purposes. Noticed they would turn it off at random too. Setup a script to SSH into it every 5 minutes and that stopped it - it's been up for a couple years now.
I wrote a script to simulate a variable workload when the load averages dipped so that I could keep my mostly-idle VMs running. It felt like a waste of energy but the VMs are in short supply which meant that Oracle has already decided that their servers will generate heat regardless of my actions: if I wasn't burning enough CPU cycles they would find someone who would.
Load average of ~30% per core seems to have been enough to repel the elephants.
I'm a PAYG subscriber and I have a single 4/24 server running. I've been on the free tier for the last year and my billing alert went off yesterday. It was set to $1.
I'm a PAYG subscriber and the notice on my account says
"Always Free Ampere A1 Compute entitlements have changed. This update does not affect your paid resources, existing paid workloads or bill. Contact support for further questions."
Thanks for clarifying this. The article is heavily AI-written and unsurprisingly does not make that distinction, which is annoying. Not a very high quality source post for this.
What you mean to describe is a free tenancy vs a paid tenancy, the latter having provided a validated payment method which gives them a higher priority on allocations, even if they are of the "Always Free" kind (a single x86-64 vCPU + 1 GB RAM) or "Free-Eligible" kind (e.g. a certain amount of the Arm stuff), even if the user never paid anything.
CC was always required. The difference is you can then add a CC for billing and move up to a paying customer status. Then you don't actually buy anything that costs money.
I’m mostly fine with this. Their free teir was crazy generous. 24GB of ram for free is a lot. They were a very popular host for free Minecraft servers because of it.
Their communication about this change has been pretty awful. It began with a silent change to the docs a month or so back, and a lot of people worrying that they would suddenly be charged. It looks like there’s actually a date associated with the change now at least. This article mentions an email that went out? I haven’t gotten any such email. I’ve already reduced my instances to within the upcoming limit, so maybe that’s why? I don’t know.
I think them downsizing the free tier is perfectly fine. Giving two weeks’ notice before terminating instances is not. But since this is Oracle, I always assumed they’d do something villainy someday, so it’s a bit whatever.
---
Hello,
We're writing to let you know about an important update regarding Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Always Free compute.
The Always Free compute limits have been updated. If your tenancy is currently using Always Free compute resources above the new limits, you must reduce your usage by August 18, 2026.
Beginning on August 18, 2026, Oracle will begin enforcing the updated Always Free compute limits. Compute instances that exceed the Always Free entitlement will be automatically terminated.
Current Always Free compute limits
Up to 2 Ampere A1 OCPUs
Up to 12 GB of memory
If your tenancy is already within these limits, no action is required.
Your tenancy and other Always Free services will remain available. If compute instances are terminated because they exceed the Always Free entitlement, you can launch new Always Free compute instances within the current limits at any time.
You can review the current Always Free limits and manage your compute resources in the OCI Console.
I don't think two weeks' notice is particularly unreasonable, especially considering that these are not paying customers. I think two weeks is enough time for the vast majority of users to come up with a plan to adjust to the new limit.
> But since this is Oracle, I always assumed they’d do something villainy someday
Shocked at the number of people here that would even admit to using them. Where did these people come from that haven't heard of the evils of this company????
Yep still an excellent free tier. The storage (200G?) and transfer (10TB I think still!?) haven't changed, and also you still get 2 free AMD64 1G VMs, so all in all, still awesome. I know people have complained about OCI/Oracle in general and shenanigans by Oracle re: their free tier instances, but my 2 instances (one A1 which I have downsized to within new limits, and one AMD) have been humming along for years and years with no issues..
The A1 has been available for 6 years without a rug pull or reductions until now on a very overly generous offering - whatever you think of oracle, it's something else. My instances from 2020 are still running...
Years ago I had an Oracle free instance which I shut down, didn't have any use that was worth the security maintenance time.
Recently wanted to make a new free instance at the lowest settings, but my zone is completely overbooked. Oracle does not let you move your free instance to a new zone.
According to what I read, the only way to spin up a new free instance is run a script elsewhere to attempt instance creation every minute using the API; and that takes an average of a couple weeks to bring something up.
Possibly, possibly not, honestly you probably can't really tell much from this.
With the RAM and storage costs being out of control it's odd it didn't happen long before now.
On top of that I wonder what running any kind of free service looks like when there are so many AI agents out there that could use and abuse them. Many forms of abuse that were more difficult to automate in the past can likely be monitored and restarted with an agentic loop now.
Reddit,even oracle forums, 99% complaints about free stuff not being available. It's why people don't offer this more regularly - instead of people being gracious it's like they're entitled to it.
It is difficult to believe that the king, perched upon his lofty throne, can hear any of what the peasants say in the squalor of the streets of the ghetto far below, on the other side of the lava moat.
It is extraordinary, but it also was incredibly hard to procure. Most data centres were almost immediately out of instances, and only the original batch of always free land grabbers really got these instances.
If you "upgrade" your account to PAYG you will not have this limitation. The "no free instances available" issue is only for accounts without a payment method.
I got this confirmed with a salesperson ~2yrs ago when I first set up my free tier on there.
Can confirm. I opened a new account and could never get any ARM instances in Ashburn region (capacity error). Signed up for PAYG (took a day - who knows why) and now no capacity problems.
I bet they want to see the test payment work it's way through the system, which given the number of midnight batch jobs that still exist in banks means waiting a day.
> Your free server will likely have a blacklisted ip address.
>
> Oracle is exceptionally frustrating to use in the first place. Pay the 5$ a month and use AWS or Digital Ocean
Funny thing that you mention this because according to Xenedra it's my DO IP that's blacklisted (even though I have it for years with no bad activities) but the free Oracle one is fine.
Also apparently they will randomly terminate your instances if they think you’re not using them enough. Or if you’re using them too much. Can’t tell, it’s not transparent.
Also, their control plane is so poorly designed, it makes AWS Console feel like good UX.
In my situation they ended up randomly closing my account a week or so after it was setup. I'd tried a few times to get an instance, and failed. Then my login suddenly didn't work and their all so helpful customer support was 'yes your account has been closed' 'why' 'we can't tell you that.'
That was after my card and everything was already setup with the company. Oracle's reputation is 100% deserved.
I'm in the same boat. I thought "how bad could it be, surely people are exaggerating" and signed up to check out their free tier. My account was killed without notice about a month after setup and I got the same treatment from support, they just instantly closed my ticket with "you account terminate."
They did eventually notify me by email a full 60 days after actually deleting my VMs and the email had a little blurb with "it would be a pleasure to serve you in the near future" but I'm pretty sure they banned me from the platform permanently.
Never trust Oracle. Using Oracle products professionally is tantamount to negligence. You will come to regret it eventually.
I tried getting some free ARM oracle servers a couple months back. I ended up setting up a whole PAYG setup, eventually got tired of trying to get their cloud to actually provision me any of these supposed free ARM systems, and have been a customer for a couple months now paying ~80/mo for the couple VPS's I've been playing with.
Speaking as an Oracle customer, let me heartily disrecommend them to everyone. Terrible experience.
I've been on the free tier 1vCPU x86 / 1GB RAM for years and it was a perfect experience. I recently upgraded to the 4/24, and indeed you need to change to PAYG or otherwise it's out of capacity, but still no problem and within the free limits. For your use case, if the 1/1 instance is enough, I highly recommend Oracle and it's not something I imagined myself saying.
If by "just," you mean a couple of weeks ago, yes.
I noticed the change to their documentation about two weeks ago. A couple days later, I checked my own account for something unrelated. My main instance (using 12 GB of RAM) was still up, but another that I only used for testing random things had just vanished from my account without a trace.
I get that they are well within their rights to reduce the Always Free resources (or even eliminate them entirely), but I did not get any notification that this was changing, nor that they would be terminating my instances that took the account above the Always Free limits. It would honestly have been _less_ sneaky (and potentially damaging) to simply start charging for resources above the new limit.
This is one of the rare instances where I don't really have an issue with Oracle doing something any sane business would to be honest. It's a free resource and RAM and storage have increased in cost substantially.
It was communicated beginning the middle of June but it's taken them a couple of months to get round to actually doing it - it's not at all reasonable to criticise given the offering. Or even any offering, nobody else even comes close. Also OCI is just technically better than every other cloud, always was. And cheaper. Also their suggestion is to upgrade to "PAYG" as it has been for several years.
This will remove a non-insignificant chunk of Tor network capacity. Many of those OCI free-tier instances were set and forget Tor relay nodes, especially since they're de facto unmetered.
The question is how far can they lower it while still claiming to have still provided the 'always free' - I mean can they reduce my nice free VM to 32k of ram and a 1/1000 of a core and a byte of bandwidth/month?
"Always Free" should probably be interpreted in the context of a recurring monthly contract: "of all the resources you use these will always be included at no additional charge"
The same applies to "Free for Life" offers: "free until it no longer makes commercial sense"
Low expectations are key. I've been using my full quota of free resources for 3+ years without an issue and I'm grateful for having a place to run various non-commercial services. I also know enough to understand that this is not the full Oracle Experience and that I shouldn't give them any money.
Weird, I've been running instances for many years and never had an issue spinning a new one up. Did you have a trial account or PAYG account? (There is a difference, trial account instances are harder to get and are subject to termination at any time.)
IIRC, the docs say you're supposed to be able to use it with a trial account. I think I did try to sign up for the other kind and ran into a wall where I had to contact support or a sales rep, and the last thing I ever want to do is talk to Oracle sales.
I can second this. Back when I first set up my free tier resources there I confirmed this with a sales rep, PAYG accounts will have immediate access to free tier resources, that limitation is only for trial accounts.
Did anyone really expect OCI deal not to become, shall we say, less generous as they slowly creep up their market share? Anyone banking on OCI being cheaper provider is playing a game of musical chairs.
Interesting, I definitely haven't received an email from Oracle about this yet. Guess I'll have to move this server somewhere else now though. Maybe OVH?
Same, haven't received anything. Maybe because I'm from the EU?
EDIT: After logging in I see a banner: "Always Free A1 Resource Limit Update
Always Free Ampere A1 Compute entitlements have changed. This update does not affect your paid resources, existing paid workloads or bill. Contact support for further questions."
It's not clear what this means for PAYG users though?
EDIT2: In th Price List it says "Each paid tenancy gets the first 3,000 OCPU hours and 18,000 GB hours per month for free to create Ampere A1 Compute instances" (https://www.oracle.com/cloud/price-list/). The word "paid" was not there before (check Wayback Machine). This would still make 4 OCPUs for PAYG customers possible. Confusing.
It is a nothing burger, for PAYG it stays the way it is:
> Each paid tenancy gets the first 3,000 OCPU hours and 18,000 GB hours per month for free to create Ampere A1 Compute instances. This free-tier usage is shared across Bare Metal, Virtual Machine, and Container Instances.
> Always Free Ampere A1 Compute entitlements have changed. This update does not affect your paid resources, existing paid workloads or bill. Contact support for further questions.
Which is slightly ambitious, but I would orientate around what the price list says.
This change is totally fair from my perspective. I see the "always free" as "you will never pay for this for as long as you keep it" as opposed to "this will always be available, and free". People who use free services like this should generally be aware that they are likely to go away or be reduced at some point. I got hit by this with PlanetScale and had to move my stuff to a self-hosted postgres.
I know we aren’t supposed to do meta comments but while this information is interesting, the link needs to be labelled as AI slop. HN needs this new LinkedIn feature.
To their credit their limits were historically crazy high compared to their competition. So I find it hard to fault them for this move.
...their tendency to delete accounts haphazardly with no obvious pattern as to who gets hit on the other hand is kind shitty. Mine's been good for years while others even with paid accounts don't fare so well
I bet they're not spending $X/m on any of your free things, they're sitting on underutilised resources they're paying for anyway at probably very handsome rates.
At worst this is included in their marketing budget.
In Canada we have a grocery chain called Superstore that posts many products as "Always $x.xx" but the prices have continually been increased over the years. I wouldn't call it a lie but it sure feels dirty and unethical. They used to use the president of the family corporation in all their ads too, but don't anymore and that's probably because he knows they're in the wrong on this and many other things (like the price fixing scandals).
If everyone knows it's a lie... well then I guess it's not a lie anymore, is it?
I kind of understand why the law takes this position. If you really think about it's hard to imagine how to truly fix this. But it still feels pretty dirty.
Expecting someone to lie doesn't mean rolling over and refusing to acknowledge it. Not unlike people making the expected reactionary cynical commentary on internet forums still demands a response.
I mean, you're very perceptive! But that's not very interesting, it's sort of the price of admission here at HN. Oracle lying in its product naming is more so.
I guess one option would be to vote with your walled and stop paying them? Oh.. wait..
Whatever Oracle is in general this specifically (and the reduced 2 CPU + 12 GB tier ) is still massively more "generous" than what any other cloud provider gives you for free.
I would think that it means they have an offering that you won't be charged for, not that they will offer the exact same thing perpetually. Like Red Robin has free refills on many sides doesn't mean that those sides will be something they serve forever.
Oof. Not actually the end of the world for me but i do have two of their free instances that i rely on every day. Lucky for me i mostly just use the functionally unlimited bandwidth they give out for free (VPN to my home server so i can access Plex, Nextcloud etc via my domain name--basically zero CPU, but lots of big file transfers)
My god though, OCI is an absolute shambles, far and away the most awful cloud related UI of any variety I've ever used. Early on i didn't realize just how impossible it was to provision free resources, i got really lucky (probably helps i signed up in the middle of the night? Idk) but i deleted a misconfigured instance that i couldn't figure out how to fix... Took me a couple days to claim another.
They say they don't take prepaid or virtual cards but pretty sure they accepted my Privacy.com virtual card which i retroactively set a $1 spending limit on. I'll still have to go make sure they're not gonna try and charge me though. Can't trust em one bit (except with my VPN traffic lmao)
For what it's worth, I am a user of this and I'd like to clear up one thing that is not obvious here:
There are actually two tiers of Free here that Oracle offers.
Always Free - No credit card required, sign up. This is what the new limit applies to
PAYG - You give a credit card, but like AWS and GCP there is a "free" tier for people who are on pay as you go plans. From what I can tell, the PAYG subscribers are not subject to this lower limit, only Always Free users.
In other words, if you want the old provisioning limits for free you just have to put your credit card info in.
There are additional reasons that you would want to switch to PAYG - for instance, oracle will literally tear down your always free resources if you are idling them, they are watching CPU and memory and if they see them idled they will take them away. Also, even provisioning always free instances is a challenge - most people have to write bots that attempt on a regular basis, since they appear to only allow you to register when existing resources are freed up, either by the reaper referenced earlier or by someone deprovisioning their always free resources. Neither of these limitations apply on the PAYG tier
It's worth clearing up, because this amount of free resources is worth a nonzero amount of money, if you provisioned comparable resources on any of the tier 1 or tier 2 cloud's you would be paying well over $1k/year for what they are handing over for free. AWS + GCP free compute offerings are anemic in comparison. It's a significant amount of compute.
> Always Free - No credit card required, sign up. This is what the new limit applies to
I don't think this is true. I just tried to sign up and it says
----
Payment/Identity Verification - You will not be charged
You won’t be charged for using OCI Free Tier. If you choose to upgrade your account to Paid tier, you will only be charged for services used over your Always Free limits. If you don’t upgrade your account to Paid tier, you will continue to have access to Always Free services.
You may see a small, temporary charge on your payment method. This is a verification hold that will be removed automatically. See the FAQ for more information.
We recommend double-checking all the information before submitting the form since some info is automatically filled.
Oracle does not accept any virtual, prepaid or single use cards in payment verification.
Debit cards that have a logo (for example, Visa, Mastercard, Discover, American Express) and don't require a PIN number can be used to sign up for a free Oracle Cloud Account.
----
So it does require a credit card for sign up.
Yep. It's NOT possible to sign up OCI without a payment method now. I signed up late last month and observed the same.
Additionally, it's next to impossible to spin up a free instance even if you provision it under the limit. Every single availability zone in the U.S. have all been constantly "emitting out of capacity" errors for free tier resource allocation. Ironically, if you provisioning beyond the free tier, they are ALL success.
So it looks like Oracle shawdow banned the free tier (or only allow a fixed set of free tier resources that are completely saturated all the time (unless someone spin down their free tier instances).
> You may see a small, temporary charge on your payment method.
A small, temporary $100 charge, lol. Gave me a little shock when I signed up as a student.
Need to sell your info to data brokers
The amount of abuse of free VMs must be absolutely immense even with credit card verification. I’m not sure there needs to be additional secret motives.
Coupled with the fact that free VM is marketing, nothing more, it's odd people would feel any other way.
The idea that a company would give compute away for free without one-or-more underlying motives is incredibly naive.
The users of this are not owed anything.
The real problem is that humans hear terms like "always" and assume "always" means "always". The things in marketing love to take advantage of this. (see also: unlimited).
Always does mean always and unlimited does mean unlimited; I think the confusion here is marketing is lies, not language.
They are one step above junk bond status. They have no reason not to.
I was under the impression that PAYG accounts having access to the old provisioning limits is still very ambiguous. This article (https://www.infoq.com/news/2026/07/oracle-cloud-free-tier-li...) mentioned by another commenter also mentions that it's still very much in the air.
Though I can also confirm the provisioning behavior for PAYG vs. trial accounts w/o payment info.
Did "always free" ever really work? When I set mine up months ago, the advice was use PAYG with free tier, because Always Free would always report it had no capacity available. Sure enough, I tested it and this was true at the time.
Trick is to make a bit larger instance, then scale it down to the always free limits - or so I've heard. You might pay a small amount, but totally worth it. That Arm server with 4 oCPU, 24GB, 200GB SSD is a beast, I've had it since 2022.
Btw make sure you crank up the SSD speed all the way, as long as it is in the always free limit, you won't be charged for it ... Even though it says you will.
I did not try for long, but I was also never able to actually provision, this was a couple years ago when I tried, the only people I saw report success were using the scripted methodology to periodically attempt I mentioned in grandparent comment.
Yes, it definitely worked. I had three servers with them for years and only added a card this year because it lifted bandwidth limits on the ARM.
It has for me. I've had several permanent Arm-VPSes running in OCI for almost 4 years, without paying a single cent. But I'm on a paid tenancy, by having provided a verified payment card, which I think is the distinction that the OP is trying to describe.
A "free tenancy" has limitations: e.g. your provisioned Free(tm) resources can suddenly be yoinked in order to satisfy an allocation from a user who's in a paid tenancy, even if that allocation also fits inside their Free(tm) envelope and ends up costing $0.00/mo. Simply put, the "paying" customers have dibs, even on free stuff.
I did actually once claim a completely free instance without payment info. It can be done but you're best off using a script, or just sticking to the free limits on a PAYG plan
They'll clean up instances that aren't doing enough for them to notice, even -- I used to run an XMPP server on one, used daily but not with many users, and they kept shutting it down at random multi-day intervals with little warning. Stopped using it.
They state that here and it's been stated there in the several years I've run Always Free VM's there: https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/FreeTier/freetier...
Some people say that doesn't apply to PAYG users, I do not know about that for sure, I am a PAYG user since 2021 and have not experienced any reclamation issues.
I’ve been PAYG for several years now and have straight up idled the instances for months at a time and never been deprovisioned
I use mine as a reverse proxy for accessing my home plex via tailscale and a few other small purposes. Noticed they would turn it off at random too. Setup a script to SSH into it every 5 minutes and that stopped it - it's been up for a couple years now.
I wrote a script to simulate a variable workload when the load averages dipped so that I could keep my mostly-idle VMs running. It felt like a waste of energy but the VMs are in short supply which meant that Oracle has already decided that their servers will generate heat regardless of my actions: if I wasn't burning enough CPU cycles they would find someone who would.
Load average of ~30% per core seems to have been enough to repel the elephants.
I'm a PAYG subscriber and I have a single 4/24 server running. I've been on the free tier for the last year and my billing alert went off yesterday. It was set to $1.
I'm a PAYG subscriber and the notice on my account says
"Always Free Ampere A1 Compute entitlements have changed. This update does not affect your paid resources, existing paid workloads or bill. Contact support for further questions."
Thanks for clarifying this. The article is heavily AI-written and unsurprisingly does not make that distinction, which is annoying. Not a very high quality source post for this.
I did not get this email, I'm on PAYG.
Adds up.
What you mean to describe is a free tenancy vs a paid tenancy, the latter having provided a validated payment method which gives them a higher priority on allocations, even if they are of the "Always Free" kind (a single x86-64 vCPU + 1 GB RAM) or "Free-Eligible" kind (e.g. a certain amount of the Arm stuff), even if the user never paid anything.
No CC required? I _have_ to enter one?
CC was always required. The difference is you can then add a CC for billing and move up to a paying customer status. Then you don't actually buy anything that costs money.
A substantially better article: https://www.infoq.com/news/2026/07/oracle-cloud-free-tier-li...
The actual Oracle docs: https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/FreeTier/freetier...
Thank you. The OP's article is clearly AI-written.
I’m mostly fine with this. Their free teir was crazy generous. 24GB of ram for free is a lot. They were a very popular host for free Minecraft servers because of it.
Their communication about this change has been pretty awful. It began with a silent change to the docs a month or so back, and a lot of people worrying that they would suddenly be charged. It looks like there’s actually a date associated with the change now at least. This article mentions an email that went out? I haven’t gotten any such email. I’ve already reduced my instances to within the upcoming limit, so maybe that’s why? I don’t know.
This is the email I received yesterday.
I think them downsizing the free tier is perfectly fine. Giving two weeks’ notice before terminating instances is not. But since this is Oracle, I always assumed they’d do something villainy someday, so it’s a bit whatever.
---
Hello,
We're writing to let you know about an important update regarding Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Always Free compute.
The Always Free compute limits have been updated. If your tenancy is currently using Always Free compute resources above the new limits, you must reduce your usage by August 18, 2026.
Beginning on August 18, 2026, Oracle will begin enforcing the updated Always Free compute limits. Compute instances that exceed the Always Free entitlement will be automatically terminated.
Current Always Free compute limits
If your tenancy is already within these limits, no action is required.Your tenancy and other Always Free services will remain available. If compute instances are terminated because they exceed the Always Free entitlement, you can launch new Always Free compute instances within the current limits at any time.
You can review the current Always Free limits and manage your compute resources in the OCI Console.
For more information, see:
Thank you for using Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.The Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Team
I don't think two weeks' notice is particularly unreasonable, especially considering that these are not paying customers. I think two weeks is enough time for the vast majority of users to come up with a plan to adjust to the new limit.
> But since this is Oracle, I always assumed they’d do something villainy someday
Shocked at the number of people here that would even admit to using them. Where did these people come from that haven't heard of the evils of this company????
It's basically unlimited bandwidth for a VPN server, for free. I hate oracle but i also hate spending money lol
Yep still an excellent free tier. The storage (200G?) and transfer (10TB I think still!?) haven't changed, and also you still get 2 free AMD64 1G VMs, so all in all, still awesome. I know people have complained about OCI/Oracle in general and shenanigans by Oracle re: their free tier instances, but my 2 instances (one A1 which I have downsized to within new limits, and one AMD) have been humming along for years and years with no issues..
The A1 has been available for 6 years without a rug pull or reductions until now on a very overly generous offering - whatever you think of oracle, it's something else. My instances from 2020 are still running...
Years ago I had an Oracle free instance which I shut down, didn't have any use that was worth the security maintenance time.
Recently wanted to make a new free instance at the lowest settings, but my zone is completely overbooked. Oracle does not let you move your free instance to a new zone.
According to what I read, the only way to spin up a new free instance is run a script elsewhere to attempt instance creation every minute using the API; and that takes an average of a couple weeks to bring something up.
Might find you have a better shot when people start resizing
it is still a sign that things aren't going well there
Possibly, possibly not, honestly you probably can't really tell much from this.
With the RAM and storage costs being out of control it's odd it didn't happen long before now.
On top of that I wonder what running any kind of free service looks like when there are so many AI agents out there that could use and abuse them. Many forms of abuse that were more difficult to automate in the past can likely be monitored and restarted with an agentic loop now.
It's a negative product line, even half is still negative. People really need to start being grateful while whoring free services....
You should be grateful to life, your family, your faith, God if you believe.
"whoring"?
Reddit,even oracle forums, 99% complaints about free stuff not being available. It's why people don't offer this more regularly - instead of people being gracious it's like they're entitled to it.
It is difficult to believe that the king, perched upon his lofty throne, can hear any of what the peasants say in the squalor of the streets of the ghetto far below, on the other side of the lava moat.
They continue to be incredibly generous. 2 vCPUs and 12 GB of RAM is extraordinary for no cost.
Are there any other incredibily generous offerings out there for computer resources? What are the best things that I'm not using?
It is extraordinary, but it also was incredibly hard to procure. Most data centres were almost immediately out of instances, and only the original batch of always free land grabbers really got these instances.
Which I imagine is what motivated this change.
If you "upgrade" your account to PAYG you will not have this limitation. The "no free instances available" issue is only for accounts without a payment method.
I got this confirmed with a salesperson ~2yrs ago when I first set up my free tier on there.
Can confirm. I opened a new account and could never get any ARM instances in Ashburn region (capacity error). Signed up for PAYG (took a day - who knows why) and now no capacity problems.
> took a day - who knows why
I bet they want to see the test payment work it's way through the system, which given the number of midnight batch jobs that still exist in banks means waiting a day.
It's only a preauth payment. It doesn't settle.
It's where I run my Hermes. C'est la vie.
If this is the first casualty of the Ellisonpocalypse I'm fine with it. May they all whither and go away.
You pay in other ways.
You’ll spend hours upon hours trying to get a free spot. And like anything free it’s full of spam.
Your free server will likely have a blacklisted ip address.
Oracle is exceptionally frustrating to use in the first place. Pay the 5$ a month and use AWS or Digital Ocean
> Your free server will likely have a blacklisted ip address. > > Oracle is exceptionally frustrating to use in the first place. Pay the 5$ a month and use AWS or Digital Ocean
Funny thing that you mention this because according to Xenedra it's my DO IP that's blacklisted (even though I have it for years with no bad activities) but the free Oracle one is fine.
I was quite surprised by that.
Also apparently they will randomly terminate your instances if they think you’re not using them enough. Or if you’re using them too much. Can’t tell, it’s not transparent.
Also, their control plane is so poorly designed, it makes AWS Console feel like good UX.
In my situation they ended up randomly closing my account a week or so after it was setup. I'd tried a few times to get an instance, and failed. Then my login suddenly didn't work and their all so helpful customer support was 'yes your account has been closed' 'why' 'we can't tell you that.'
That was after my card and everything was already setup with the company. Oracle's reputation is 100% deserved.
I'm in the same boat. I thought "how bad could it be, surely people are exaggerating" and signed up to check out their free tier. My account was killed without notice about a month after setup and I got the same treatment from support, they just instantly closed my ticket with "you account terminate."
They did eventually notify me by email a full 60 days after actually deleting my VMs and the email had a little blurb with "it would be a pleasure to serve you in the near future" but I'm pretty sure they banned me from the platform permanently.
Never trust Oracle. Using Oracle products professionally is tantamount to negligence. You will come to regret it eventually.
I tried getting some free ARM oracle servers a couple months back. I ended up setting up a whole PAYG setup, eventually got tired of trying to get their cloud to actually provision me any of these supposed free ARM systems, and have been a customer for a couple months now paying ~80/mo for the couple VPS's I've been playing with.
Speaking as an Oracle customer, let me heartily disrecommend them to everyone. Terrible experience.
Their reputation is what keeps me away from anything free of theirs.
Thanks for saving me some time. I wanted a free little server in case my home RPi is down for whatever reason. Not surprised it's too good to be true.
I've been on the free tier 1vCPU x86 / 1GB RAM for years and it was a perfect experience. I recently upgraded to the 4/24, and indeed you need to change to PAYG or otherwise it's out of capacity, but still no problem and within the free limits. For your use case, if the 1/1 instance is enough, I highly recommend Oracle and it's not something I imagined myself saying.
If by "just," you mean a couple of weeks ago, yes.
I noticed the change to their documentation about two weeks ago. A couple days later, I checked my own account for something unrelated. My main instance (using 12 GB of RAM) was still up, but another that I only used for testing random things had just vanished from my account without a trace.
I get that they are well within their rights to reduce the Always Free resources (or even eliminate them entirely), but I did not get any notification that this was changing, nor that they would be terminating my instances that took the account above the Always Free limits. It would honestly have been _less_ sneaky (and potentially damaging) to simply start charging for resources above the new limit.
But, Oracle gonna Oracle I guess.
> But, Oracle gonna Oracle I guess.
This is one of the rare instances where I don't really have an issue with Oracle doing something any sane business would to be honest. It's a free resource and RAM and storage have increased in cost substantially.
> I don't really have an issue with Oracle doing something any sane business would to be honest.
I don’t have an issue with the reduction, but the communication around it could have been better.
Now that is a fair criticism and I agree with that sentiment, I'm not a direct customer so I was unaware altogether.
It was communicated beginning the middle of June but it's taken them a couple of months to get round to actually doing it - it's not at all reasonable to criticise given the offering. Or even any offering, nobody else even comes close. Also OCI is just technically better than every other cloud, always was. And cheaper. Also their suggestion is to upgrade to "PAYG" as it has been for several years.
Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower
https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=2305
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15886728
This reminded me that I tried to create the account on the Oracle Cloud and claim the free tier.
I tried a few times it always went to some sort of verification that after some time ended up in a rejection with no follow up process.
fun
This will remove a non-insignificant chunk of Tor network capacity. Many of those OCI free-tier instances were set and forget Tor relay nodes, especially since they're de facto unmetered.
The question is how far can they lower it while still claiming to have still provided the 'always free' - I mean can they reduce my nice free VM to 32k of ram and a 1/1000 of a core and a byte of bandwidth/month?
"Always Free" should probably be interpreted in the context of a recurring monthly contract: "of all the resources you use these will always be included at no additional charge"
The same applies to "Free for Life" offers: "free until it no longer makes commercial sense"
Low expectations are key. I've been using my full quota of free resources for 3+ years without an issue and I'm grateful for having a place to run various non-commercial services. I also know enough to understand that this is not the full Oracle Experience and that I shouldn't give them any money.
I'll take 32KB, a 6502 core, and 2400 baud of bandwidth.
These were never actually available anyways, I tried multiple times over the years in multiple regions and I always got “no capacity”.
Weird, I've been running instances for many years and never had an issue spinning a new one up. Did you have a trial account or PAYG account? (There is a difference, trial account instances are harder to get and are subject to termination at any time.)
IIRC, the docs say you're supposed to be able to use it with a trial account. I think I did try to sign up for the other kind and ran into a wall where I had to contact support or a sales rep, and the last thing I ever want to do is talk to Oracle sales.
I can second this. Back when I first set up my free tier resources there I confirmed this with a sales rep, PAYG accounts will have immediate access to free tier resources, that limitation is only for trial accounts.
Did anyone really expect OCI deal not to become, shall we say, less generous as they slowly creep up their market share? Anyone banking on OCI being cheaper provider is playing a game of musical chairs.
Interesting, I definitely haven't received an email from Oracle about this yet. Guess I'll have to move this server somewhere else now though. Maybe OVH?
Same, haven't received anything. Maybe because I'm from the EU?
EDIT: After logging in I see a banner: "Always Free A1 Resource Limit Update
Always Free Ampere A1 Compute entitlements have changed. This update does not affect your paid resources, existing paid workloads or bill. Contact support for further questions."
It's not clear what this means for PAYG users though?
EDIT2: In th Price List it says "Each paid tenancy gets the first 3,000 OCPU hours and 18,000 GB hours per month for free to create Ampere A1 Compute instances" (https://www.oracle.com/cloud/price-list/). The word "paid" was not there before (check Wayback Machine). This would still make 4 OCPUs for PAYG customers possible. Confusing.
Giving my payment info Oracle feels like giving matches to an arson.
Is this an ads to get people who are interested in a low cost device / free device?
Is this a second order ads?
It is a nothing burger, for PAYG it stays the way it is:
> Each paid tenancy gets the first 3,000 OCPU hours and 18,000 GB hours per month for free to create Ampere A1 Compute instances. This free-tier usage is shared across Bare Metal, Virtual Machine, and Container Instances.
https://www.oracle.com/cloud/price-list/
When I login, top banner also says:
> Always Free Ampere A1 Compute entitlements have changed. This update does not affect your paid resources, existing paid workloads or bill. Contact support for further questions.
Which is slightly ambitious, but I would orientate around what the price list says.
Good callout to make sure people are aware.
This change is totally fair from my perspective. I see the "always free" as "you will never pay for this for as long as you keep it" as opposed to "this will always be available, and free". People who use free services like this should generally be aware that they are likely to go away or be reduced at some point. I got hit by this with PlanetScale and had to move my stuff to a self-hosted postgres.
But that's not what's happening: People took the always free offer, but the offer they took ends now for them not just for new users.
“Always free ice cream” doesn’t guarantee the same flavors and amount per serving.
you can also get 2 x 1vCPU x86 / 1GB RAM
those are besides the ARM ones.
block storage is 200gb, which can now be split in 100gb volumes.
before you could split it in 4 and have 4 VMs (min was 50gb for boot volume).
Don't use Oracle for anything.
I wonder what other venues they try to maximise now that expenses and loans are what they are?
I know we aren’t supposed to do meta comments but while this information is interesting, the link needs to be labelled as AI slop. HN needs this new LinkedIn feature.
To their credit their limits were historically crazy high compared to their competition. So I find it hard to fault them for this move.
...their tendency to delete accounts haphazardly with no obvious pattern as to who gets hit on the other hand is kind shitty. Mine's been good for years while others even with paid accounts don't fare so well
Gotta cover One Rich Asshole Called Larry Elison’s crazy AI debts somehow.
I realized some time ago that Oracle spelled backwards is "el caro," which (according to Google translate) means "the expensive one" in Spanish.
Ellison is bankrupting Oracle on his AI psychosis.
God willing
"Always Free" is never free without changes to existing limits.
That's an AI slop blog
But it's an honest take!
Never trust oracle.
So... what did "Always" mean, exactly?
Not limited to exactly 12 months, like our competitor's promotion.
Were you expecting a massive evil corporation to keep spending $50 every month on you forever?
There's a fallacy in there somewhere.
I bet they're not spending $X/m on any of your free things, they're sitting on underutilised resources they're paying for anyway at probably very handsome rates.
At worst this is included in their marketing budget.
> Were you expecting a massive evil corporation to keep spending $50 every month on you forever?
When they offer something "always"... yes? Are "always" and "forever" not synonyms?
I'm not arguing about the economics or motivation, just pointing out that simple language says that they lied.
In Canada we have a grocery chain called Superstore that posts many products as "Always $x.xx" but the prices have continually been increased over the years. I wouldn't call it a lie but it sure feels dirty and unethical. They used to use the president of the family corporation in all their ads too, but don't anymore and that's probably because he knows they're in the wrong on this and many other things (like the price fixing scandals).
Ah, my favorite exception to fraud: Puffery. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puffery
If everyone knows it's a lie... well then I guess it's not a lie anymore, is it?
I kind of understand why the law takes this position. If you really think about it's hard to imagine how to truly fix this. But it still feels pretty dirty.
Origin of "puff peice", today I learned.
Were you expecting anything to last forever? The sun's gonna explode, you know.
Expecting someone to lie doesn't mean rolling over and refusing to acknowledge it. Not unlike people making the expected reactionary cynical commentary on internet forums still demands a response.
I mean, you're very perceptive! But that's not very interesting, it's sort of the price of admission here at HN. Oracle lying in its product naming is more so.
When Amazon says something is always free in the free tier, it's opposite things that are free for the first 12 months of your account.
> over and refusing to acknowledge it.
I guess one option would be to vote with your walled and stop paying them? Oh.. wait..
Whatever Oracle is in general this specifically (and the reduced 2 CPU + 12 GB tier ) is still massively more "generous" than what any other cloud provider gives you for free.
Conditionally
If you have it, it'll always be free.
I would think that it means they have an offering that you won't be charged for, not that they will offer the exact same thing perpetually. Like Red Robin has free refills on many sides doesn't mean that those sides will be something they serve forever.
Oof. Not actually the end of the world for me but i do have two of their free instances that i rely on every day. Lucky for me i mostly just use the functionally unlimited bandwidth they give out for free (VPN to my home server so i can access Plex, Nextcloud etc via my domain name--basically zero CPU, but lots of big file transfers)
My god though, OCI is an absolute shambles, far and away the most awful cloud related UI of any variety I've ever used. Early on i didn't realize just how impossible it was to provision free resources, i got really lucky (probably helps i signed up in the middle of the night? Idk) but i deleted a misconfigured instance that i couldn't figure out how to fix... Took me a couple days to claim another.
They say they don't take prepaid or virtual cards but pretty sure they accepted my Privacy.com virtual card which i retroactively set a $1 spending limit on. I'll still have to go make sure they're not gonna try and charge me though. Can't trust em one bit (except with my VPN traffic lmao)
Imagine doing business with a going concern related to Larry Ellison, and doing so unironically.