Oracle Cloud Free Tier — source summary
The official Oracle Cloud Free Tier page (oracle.com/cloud/free), fetched 2026-05-31.
This is the content counterpart to the JS-only signup SPA that was previously ingested
and removed (see log.md); unlike that stub, this page is server-rendered and substantive.
URL-only ingest — no copy held in raw/ (hence url: rather than sources:).
The offering — two distinct parts
Oracle frames the Free Tier as a combination of a time-limited trial and a permanent free allowance:
- US$300 cloud credit / 30-day free trial. A US$300 credit usable for 30 days across all OCI services (not just the free ones).
- Always Free services. Available for an unlimited time (“some limitations apply”). As new Always Free services are added, accounts get them automatically.
After the 30 days: either switch to Pay As You Go (pay only for usage exceeding the monthly Always Free amounts), or do nothing and simply keep the Always Free services.
Always Free services (as listed on the page)
- AMD-based Compute
- Arm-based Ampere A1 Compute
- Object Storage
- Flexible Load Balancer
- Flexible Network Load Balancer
- Autonomous Data Warehouse
- Autonomous Transaction Processing
- Autonomous JSON Database
- NoSQL Database (Phoenix Region only)
Always Free quotas (from Oracle’s resource-details docs)
The marketing page only says “some limitations apply”; the actual per-service limits come from
Oracle’s official Always Free Resources docs (docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/FreeTier/ freetier_topic-Always_Free_Resources.htm), fetched 2026-06-09. Snapshot — Oracle revises these:
- Compute (AMD): up to 2× VM.Standard.E2.1.Micro (1/8 OCPU, 1 GB RAM each).
- Compute (Arm Ampere A1): 3,000 OCPU-hours + 18,000 GB-hours per month ≈ 4 OCPUs / 24 GB always-on, splittable across instances (up to 4 compute instances total across both shapes).
- Block volume: 200 GB total (boot + block), 5 backups; min boot volume 47 GB/instance.
- Object/Archive storage: 20 GB total, 50,000 API requests/month.
- Databases: 2 Autonomous DBs (1 OCPU, 20 GB, ≤20 sessions each — ATP/ADW/JSON/APEX); 1 NoSQL (133M reads + 133M writes/month, 3×25 GB tables); 1 MySQL HeatWave (50 GB + 50 GB backup).
- Networking: 1 Flexible LB + 1 Network LB, 2 VCNs, 50 site-to-site VPNs.
- Outbound data transfer: 10 TB/month — a notably generous egress allowance.
- Plus monitoring (500M ingestion points), Vault, Resource Manager, email/notifications.
This closes the spoke’s standing open question on the Always Free quotas. The headline: the Arm A1 (4 OCPU / 24 GB) + 10 TB egress allowance is unusually large for a permanent free tier — the real substance behind Oracle’s “free-tier funnel” positioning.
Eligibility & signup requirements
- One Free Trial or Always Free account per person.
- Accounts left idle for 30+ days may be deemed abandoned and suspended/terminated.
- A credit or debit card is required at signup (debit must function like a credit card; no PIN-debit, virtual, single-use, or prepaid cards). You’re charged only for usage that exceeds Always Free.
Relation to the spoke
The contrast partner to hetzner-cloud: where Hetzner is a low-cost paid IaaS, Oracle leads with a free-tier funnel (permanent Always Free tier + a $300 trial) — the “opposite ends of the positioning spectrum” the synthesis notes, now backed by real content rather than a stub.
Related
hetzner-cloud · fly-io · render · railway