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> 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.

Need to sell your info to data brokers

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.

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.

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).

Always does mean always and unlimited does mean unlimited; I think the confusion here is marketing is lies, not language.

They are one step above junk bond status. They have no reason not to.

> 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.

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).

You can't use them on the Always Free tier, but if you have a PAYG account you can spin up free instances (free so long as you stay within the limits).

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 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.

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.

i've attempted signing up for this thing like multiple times over the years and i've never had luck trying to game their free tier. based on all the other comments it sounds like you're SOL at this point none available or people on 4/24 are getting downgraded. maybe i'll try again sometime but i haven't seen any recent success stories

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.

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.

I did actually once claim a completely free instance without payment info. It can be done but you're best off using a script, or just sticking to the free limits on a PAYG plan

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.

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.

I’ve been PAYG for several years now and have straight up idled the instances for months at a time and never been deprovisioned

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.

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.

> afaik the PAYG subscribers are not subject to this lower limit ... In other words, if you want the old provisioning limits for free you just have to put your credit card info in.

Always Free can mean different things: to a tenancy like you're describing, or to resources, where it describes the amount of resources you can use for free before you start getting charged money.

https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/FreeTier/freetier...

> All Oracle Cloud Infrastructure accounts (whether free or paid) have a set of resources that are free of charge ... These resources display the Always Free-eligible label

> All tenancies get a set of Always Free resources in the Compute service ... All tenancies get the first 1,500 OCPU hours and 9,000 GB hours per month for free for VM instances using the VM.Standard.A1.Flex shape.

That's for all tenancies, and calculates to 2 OCPUs and 12GB per month. So sure, the provisioning _limits_ go up for PAYG tenancies, but using them certainly ain't free! If you have a 4/24 VM you have to downsize it if you don't want to be charged for 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.

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'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."

Compared to any normal hosting provider, you'd be paying 50 €/year for what Oracle is handing over for free. Plus you don't need to use the absolute trainwreck that is the OCI web console.

"Cloud" providers are not the only way and you get precisely none of their benefits if all you do is run a single instance, so they're really not a good comparison.

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?

CC was always required. The difference is you can then add a CC for billing and move up to a paying customer status. Then you don't actually buy anything that costs money.

I did not get this email, I'm on PAYG.

Adds up.