alt Hacker News> 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
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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.
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So it does require a credit card for sign up.
Replies
> You may see a small, temporary charge on your payment method.
A small, temporary $100 charge, lol. Gave me a little shock when I signed up as a student.
Yep. It's NOT possible to sign up OCI without a payment method now. I signed up late last month and observed the same.
Additionally, it's next to impossible to spin up a free instance even if you provision it under the limit. Every single availability zone in the U.S. have all been constantly "emitting out of capacity" errors for free tier resource allocation. Ironically, if you provisioning beyond the free tier, they are ALL success.
So it looks like Oracle shawdow banned the free tier (or only allow a fixed set of free tier resources that are completely saturated all the time (unless someone spin down their free tier instances).