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Comment by waveringana | Hacker News Reader

the catch is: no commercial usage and half the time you try to spin up an instance itll tell you theres no room left

That limitation (spinning up an instance) only exists if you don't put a payment card in. If you put a payment card in, it goes away immediately. You don't have to actually pay anything, you can provision the always free resources, but obviously in this regard you have to ensure that you don't accidentally provision something with cost. I used terraform to make my little kube cluster on there and have not had a cost event at all in over 1.5 years. I think at one point I accidentally provisioned a volume or something and it cost me like one cent.

> no commercial usage

I think that's if you are literally on their free tier, vs. having a billable account which doesn't accumulate enough charges to be billed.

Similar to the sibling comment - you add a credit card and set yourself up to be billed (which removes you from the "free tier"), but you are still granted the resources monthly for free. If you exceed your allocation, they bill the difference.

Honestly I’m surprised they even let you provision the resources without a payment card. Seems ripe for abuse

I would presume account sign up is a loss leader in order to get ~spam~ marketing leads, and that they don't accept mailinator domains

They also, like many other cloud providers, need a real physical payment card. No privacy.com stuff. No virtual cards. Of course they don’t tell you this outright, because obscurity fraud blah blah blah, but if you try to use any type of virtual card it’s gonna get rejected. And if your naïve ass thought you could pay with the virtual card you’ll get a nice lesson in how cloud providers deal with fraud. They’ll never tell you that virtual cards aren’t allowed, because something something fraud, your payment will just mysteriously fail and you’ll get no guidance as to what went wrong and you have to basically guess it out.

This is basically any cloud provider by the way, not specific to Oracle. Ran into this with GCP recently. Insane experience. Pay with card. Get payment rejected by fraud team after several months of successful same amount payments on the same card and they won’t tell what the problem is. They ask for verification. Provide all sorts of verification. On the sixth attempt, send a picture of a physical card and all holds removed immediately

It’s such a perfect microcosm capturing of dealing with megacorps today. During that whole ordeal it was painfully obvious that the fraud team on the other side were telling me to recite the correct incantation to pass their filters, but they weren’t allowed to tell me what the incantation was. Only the signals they sent me and some educated guesswork were able to get me over the hurdle

>No privacy.com stuff. No virtual cards.

I used a privacy.com Mastercard linked to my bank account for Oracle's payment method to upgrade to PAYG. It may have changed, this was a few months ago. Set limit to 100, they charged and reverted $100.

> send a picture of a physical card and all holds removed immediately

So you're saying there's a chance to use a prepaid card if you can copy it's digits onto a real looking plastic card? Lol

Unironically yes. The (real) physical card I provided was a very cheap looking one. They didn’t seem to care much about its look but rather the physicality of it

Using AWS with virtual debit cards all right. Revolut cards work fine for me. What may also be a differentiator: Phone number used for registration is registered also for an account already having an established track record, and has a physical card for payments. (just guessing)

A credit card is required for sign up but it won't be set up as a billing card until you add it. One curious thing they do is though, the free trial is the only entry way to create a new cloud account. You can't become a nonfree customer from the get go. This is weird because their free trial signup is horrible. The free trial is in very high demand so understandably they refuse a lot of accounts which they would probably like as nonfree customers.

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