alt Hacker NewsOracle cut its Always Free ARM limits to 2 OCPU / 12GB, enforced Aug 18
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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...
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.
They continue to be incredibly generous. 2 vCPUs and 12 GB of RAM is extraordinary for no cost.
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...
You pay in other ways.
You’ll spend hours upon hours trying to get a free spot. And like anything free it’s full of spam.
Your free server will likely have a blacklisted ip address.
Oracle is exceptionally frustrating to use in the first place. Pay the 5$ a month and use AWS or Digital Ocean
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.
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.
This reminded me that I tried to create the account on the Oracle Cloud and claim the free tier.
I tried a few times it always went to some sort of verification that after some time ended up in a rejection with no follow up process.
fun
This will remove a non-insignificant chunk of Tor network capacity. Many of those OCI free-tier instances were set and forget Tor relay nodes, especially since they're de facto unmetered.
Is this an ads to get people who are interested in a low cost device / free device?
Is this a second order ads?
you can also get 2 x 1vCPU x86 / 1GB RAM
those are besides the ARM ones.
block storage is 200gb, which can now be split in 100gb volumes.
before you could split it in 4 and have 4 VMs (min was 50gb for boot volume).
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?
It is a nothing burger, for PAYG it stays the way it is:
> 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. This free-tier usage is shared across Bare Metal, Virtual Machine, and Container Instances.
https://www.oracle.com/cloud/price-list/
When I login, top banner also 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.
Which is slightly ambitious, but I would orientate around what the price list says.
These were never actually available anyways, I tried multiple times over the years in multiple regions and I always got “no capacity”.
Don't use Oracle for anything.
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.
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?
To their credit their limits were historically crazy high compared to their competition. So I find it hard to fault them for this move.
...their tendency to delete accounts haphazardly with no obvious pattern as to who gets hit on the other hand is kind shitty. Mine's been good for years while others even with paid accounts don't fare so well
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.
I wonder what other venues they try to maximise now that expenses and loans are what they are?
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.
Gotta cover One Rich Asshole Called Larry Elison’s crazy AI debts somehow.
"Always Free" is never free without changes to existing limits.
Imagine doing business with a going concern related to Larry Ellison, and doing so unironically.
Never trust oracle.
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.