I signed up for Oracle Cloud. I couldn’t get any of the free trial options to work due to capacity limits. I couldn’t get my payment method added so I could pay for real servers.

Then they terminated my free trial early with no explanation. I tried to add a payment method again and it didn’t work.

It turned into a bigger joke when Oracle sales people started emailing me to ask how my trial was going. They must have been given a list of email addresses and no information about the accounts. I would ask them for help getting my account unlocked or adding a payment method, they would send me emails for a couple weeks saying they were looking into it, then they’d ghost me.

Then a month later a new sales rep would email me and start the process over.

I checked Reddit and there were dozens of stories with the same experience.

Oracle Cloud sometimes feels like an elaborate prank that I'm not in on. I know people and companies on AWS (obviously), Azure, Google Cloud, Hetzner, CloudFlare's various PaaS offerings, etc., but I can't name a single thing running on Oracle Cloud. Somebody out there is clearly using but I'll be damned if I know who it is.

That is crazy. One of the main rules of business is to always make it as easy as possible for customers to give you money.

Good to know it's not only problematic on the free tier. I wanted to sign up to get the free credits but couldn't finish the setup. I tried again now and it accepted/charged my card ($1 verification test) but then after the account was created it said I need a credit card?

They couldn't integrate a payment provider and expect to build out the data centers for AGI?

Uh, good luck guys.