For what it's worth, I am a user of this and I'd like to clear up one thing that is not obvious here:
There are actually two tiers of Free here that Oracle offers.
Always Free - No credit card required, sign up. This is what the new limit applies to
PAYG - You give a credit card, but like AWS and GCP there is a "free" tier for people who are on pay as you go plans. From what I can tell, the PAYG subscribers are not subject to this lower limit, only Always Free users.
In other words, if you want the old provisioning limits for free you just have to put your credit card info in.
There are additional reasons that you would want to switch to PAYG - for instance, oracle will literally tear down your always free resources if you are idling them, they are watching CPU and memory and if they see them idled they will take them away. Also, even provisioning always free instances is a challenge - most people have to write bots that attempt on a regular basis, since they appear to only allow you to register when existing resources are freed up, either by the reaper referenced earlier or by someone deprovisioning their always free resources. Neither of these limitations apply on the PAYG tier
It's worth clearing up, because this amount of free resources is worth a nonzero amount of money, if you provisioned comparable resources on any of the tier 1 or tier 2 cloud's you would be paying well over $1k/year for what they are handing over for free. AWS + GCP free compute offerings are anemic in comparison. It's a significant amount of compute.
I’m mostly fine with this. Their free teir was crazy generous. 24GB of ram for free is a lot. They were a very popular host for free Minecraft servers because of it.
Their communication about this change has been pretty awful. It began with a silent change to the docs a month or so back, and a lot of people worrying that they would suddenly be charged. It looks like there’s actually a date associated with the change now at least. This article mentions an email that went out? I haven’t gotten any such email. I’ve already reduced my instances to within the upcoming limit, so maybe that’s why? I don’t know.
Yep still an excellent free tier. The storage (200G?) and transfer (10TB I think still!?) haven't changed, and also you still get 2 free AMD64 1G VMs, so all in all, still awesome. I know people have complained about OCI/Oracle in general and shenanigans by Oracle re: their free tier instances, but my 2 instances (one A1 which I have downsized to within new limits, and one AMD) have been humming along for years and years with no issues..
A substantially better article: https://www.infoq.com/news/2026/07/oracle-cloud-free-tier-li...
The actual Oracle docs: https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/FreeTier/freetier...
Thank you. The OP's article is clearly AI-written.
I tried getting some free ARM oracle servers a couple months back. I ended up setting up a whole PAYG setup, eventually got tired of trying to get their cloud to actually provision me any of these supposed free ARM systems, and have been a customer for a couple months now paying ~80/mo for the couple VPS's I've been playing with.
Speaking as an Oracle customer, let me heartily disrecommend them to everyone. Terrible experience.
Their reputation is what keeps me away from anything free of theirs.
Did anyone really expect OCI deal not to become, shall we say, less generous as they slowly creep up their market share? Anyone banking on OCI being cheaper provider is playing a game of musical chairs.
They continue to be incredibly generous. 2 vCPUs and 12 GB of RAM is extraordinary for no cost.
It is extraordinary, but it also was incredibly hard to procure. Most data centres were almost immediately out of instances, and only the original batch of always free land grabbers really got these instances.
Which I imagine is what motivated this change.
If you "upgrade" your account to PAYG you will not have this limitation. The "no free instances available" issue is only for accounts without a payment method.
I got this confirmed with a salesperson ~2yrs ago when I first set up my free tier on there.
If by "just," you mean a couple of weeks ago, yes.
I noticed the change to their documentation about two weeks ago. A couple days later, I checked my own account for something unrelated. My main instance (using 12 GB of RAM) was still up, but another that I only used for testing random things had just vanished from my account without a trace.
I get that they are well within their rights to reduce the Always Free resources (or even eliminate them entirely), but I did not get any notification that this was changing, nor that they would be terminating my instances that took the account above the Always Free limits. It would honestly have been _less_ sneaky (and potentially damaging) to simply start charging for resources above the new limit.
But, Oracle gonna Oracle I guess.
> But, Oracle gonna Oracle I guess.
This is one of the rare instances where I don't really have an issue with Oracle doing something any sane business would to be honest. It's a free resource and RAM and storage have increased in cost substantially.
> I don't really have an issue with Oracle doing something any sane business would to be honest.
I don’t have an issue with the reduction, but the communication around it could have been better.
Now that is a fair criticism and I agree with that sentiment, I'm not a direct customer so I was unaware altogether.
Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower
It was communicated beginning the middle of June but it's taken them a couple of months to get round to actually doing it - it's not at all reasonable to criticise given the offering. Or even any offering, nobody else even comes close. Also OCI is just technically better than every other cloud, always was. And cheaper. Also their suggestion is to upgrade to "PAYG" as it has been for several years.
Don't use Oracle for anything.
It's where I run my Hermes. C'est la vie.
If this is the first casualty of the Ellisonpocalypse I'm fine with it. May they all whither and go away.
The A1 has been available for 6 years without a rug pull or reductions until now on a very overly generous offering - whatever you think of oracle, it's something else. My instances from 2020 are still running...
Years ago I had an Oracle free instance which I shut down, didn't have any use that was worth the security maintenance time.
Recently wanted to make a new free instance at the lowest settings, but my zone is completely overbooked. Oracle does not let you move your free instance to a new zone.
According to what I read, the only way to spin up a new free instance is run a script elsewhere to attempt instance creation every minute using the API; and that takes an average of a couple weeks to bring something up.
it is still a sign that things aren't going well there
Possibly, possibly not, honestly you probably can't really tell much from this.
With the RAM and storage costs being out of control it's odd it didn't happen long before now.
On top of that I wonder what running any kind of free service looks like when there are so many AI agents out there that could use and abuse them. Many forms of abuse that were more difficult to automate in the past can likely be monitored and restarted with an agentic loop now.
It's a negative product line, even half is still negative. People really need to start being grateful while whoring free services....
"whoring"?
Reddit,even oracle forums, 99% complaints about free stuff not being available. It's why people don't offer this more regularly - instead of people being gracious it's like they're entitled to it.
The question is how far can they lower it while still claiming to have still provided the 'always free' - I mean can they reduce my nice free VM to 32k of ram and a 1/1000 of a core and a byte of bandwidth/month?
These were never actually available anyways, I tried multiple times over the years in multiple regions and I always got “no capacity”.
Weird, I've been running instances for many years and never had an issue spinning a new one up. Did you have a trial account or PAYG account? (There is a difference, trial account instances are harder to get and are subject to termination at any time.)
IIRC, the docs say you're supposed to be able to use it with a trial account. I think I did try to sign up for the other kind and ran into a wall where I had to contact support or a sales rep, and the last thing I ever want to do is talk to Oracle sales.
I can second this. Back when I first set up my free tier resources there I confirmed this with a sales rep, PAYG accounts will have immediate access to free tier resources, that limitation is only for trial accounts.
Interesting, I definitely haven't received an email from Oracle about this yet. Guess I'll have to move this server somewhere else now though. Maybe OVH?
Same, haven't received anything. Maybe because I'm from the EU?
EDIT: After logging in I see a banner: "Always Free A1 Resource Limit Update
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."
It's not clear what this means for PAYG users though?
EDIT2: In th Price List it says "Each paid tenancy gets the first 3,000 OCPU hours and 18,000 GB hours per month for free to create Ampere A1 Compute instances" (https://www.oracle.com/cloud/price-list/). The word "paid" was not there before (check Wayback Machine). This would still make 4 OCPUs for PAYG customers possible. Confusing.
I wonder what other venues they try to maximise now that expenses and loans are what they are?
Never trust oracle.
"Always Free" is never free without changes to existing limits.
I know we aren’t supposed to do meta comments but while this information is interesting, the link needs to be labelled as AI slop. HN needs this new LinkedIn feature.
So... what did "Always" mean, exactly?
Not limited to exactly 12 months, like our competitor's promotion.
Were you expecting a massive evil corporation to keep spending $50 every month on you forever?
> Were you expecting a massive evil corporation to keep spending $50 every month on you forever?
When they offer something "always"... yes? Are "always" and "forever" not synonyms?
I'm not arguing about the economics or motivation, just pointing out that simple language says that they lied.
In Canada we have a grocery chain called Superstore that posts many products as "Always $x.xx" but the prices have continually been increased over the years. I wouldn't call it a lie but it sure feels dirty and unethical. They used to use the president of the family corporation in all their ads too, but don't anymore and that's probably because he knows they're in the wrong on this and many other things (like the price fixing scandals).
Were you expecting anything to last forever? The sun's gonna explode, you know.
Expecting someone to lie doesn't mean rolling over and refusing to acknowledge it. Not unlike people making the expected reactionary cynical commentary on internet forums still demands a response.
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.
I would think that it means they have an offering that you won't be charged for, not that they will offer the exact same thing perpetually. Like Red Robin has free refills on many sides doesn't mean that those sides will be something they serve forever.
If you have it, it'll always be free.
Conditionally
That's an AI slop blog
But it's an honest take!
Good callout to make sure people are aware.
This change is totally fair from my perspective. I see the "always free" as "you will never pay for this for as long as you keep it" as opposed to "this will always be available, and free". People who use free services like this should generally be aware that they are likely to go away or be reduced at some point. I got hit by this with PlanetScale and had to move my stuff to a self-hosted postgres.
But that's not what's happening: People took the always free offer, but the offer they took ends now for them not just for new users.
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.
> 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
----
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.
----
So it does require a credit card for sign up.
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.
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.