| ▲ | SOLAR_FIELDS 4 hours ago |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | collabs 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| > 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. |
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| ▲ | devy 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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). | |
| ▲ | sva_ 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > 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. | |
| ▲ | downrightmike 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Need to sell your info to data brokers | | |
| ▲ | eli 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | tcdent 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | sophacles 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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). |
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| ▲ | mapkkk 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | silisili 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | blfr an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | |
| ▲ | sva_ 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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. | |
| ▲ | SOLAR_FIELDS 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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. | |
| ▲ | daneel_w 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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. |
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| ▲ | sunnynuts an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | blfr an hour ago | parent [-] | | 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." |
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| ▲ | syntheticnature 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | zenoprax an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | |
| ▲ | newsoftheday 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | SOLAR_FIELDS 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | I’ve been PAYG for several years now and have straight up idled the instances for months at a time and never been deprovisioned |
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| ▲ | somehnguy 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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. |
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| ▲ | daneel_w 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | 0x262d 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | brnt 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| No CC required? I _have_ to enter one? |
