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:

1. 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).
2. 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): 1,500 OCPU-hours + 9,000 GB-hours per month ≈ 2 OCPUs / 12 GB always-on, splittable across instances (up to 4 compute instances total across both shapes). Changed — halved. This page recorded 3,000 OCPU-hours + 18,000 GB-hours ≈ 4 OCPUs / 24 GB as of the 2026-06-09 fetch; the same Oracle docs page read on 2026-08-13 gives half that. Both readings are kept per record-don't-overwrite. Oracle did not date the change and no announcement was found, so the only thing established is that the figure was one value in June and the other in August.
• 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 on Always-Free-only accounts; paid/trial accounts get 10 GB Standard + 10 GB Infrequent Access + 10 GB Archive instead (the split was not recorded before).
• 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, and the 2026-08-13 re-verification is the first time a figure in this spoke has been caught moving. The headline as originally written was the Arm A1 (4 OCPU / 24 GB) + 10 TB egress allowance; at 2 OCPU / 12 GB the compute half is now merely good rather than exceptional, while 10 TB/month egress is untouched and remains the genuinely unusual part of the offer.

The wider point for the spoke: a permanent free allowance is permanent in duration, not in size. render's spin-down and AWS's 6-month burn-down announce their limits up front; Oracle's shape degrades quietly, and only a re-read catches it.

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

Re-tiered 2026-08-21 → T1. Under the corpus rule (../QUALITY.md → tier by the claim, not the URL), this page rests on the official Oracle Cloud Free Tier page, read first-party. Its load-bearing content is the composition of the offer — a time-limited trial plus a set of Always Free resources, with the specific shapes and quotas named. Those are terms Oracle sets and publishes; nothing on this page rests on Oracle telling us how well the service performs.