Were you expecting anything to last forever? The sun's gonna explode, you know.
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.
If you take a service that you told someone was "always free" and start charging them for that, that's a lie. It just is. I'm gobsmacked that this community views this as acceptable marketing. Is this the moral foundation of our new era of startup overlords?
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.