> 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

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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.

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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).

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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.

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downrightmike 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Need to sell your info to data brokers

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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.

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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).