alt Hacker NewsFor 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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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.
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 did not get this email, I'm on PAYG.
Adds up.
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.
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.
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.
No CC required? I _have_ to enter one?
> 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.