Oracle Cloud Free Tier

What Oracle Cloud Free Tier actually is

Oracle Cloud Free Tier is the free entry point to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), and it is the most generous perpetual free offer from any major cloud. It has two parts: a 30-day free trial with US$300 of credits to burn across nearly all OCI services, and a set of "Always Free" resources that stay with the account indefinitely — no clock, no expiry, no automatic charges. Oracle announced it at OpenWorld in September 2019, explicitly positioning it against rivals whose database free tiers lapse after 12 months, and the Always Free catalogue has grown since: it now covers more than 20 services.

What you actually get, per Oracle's own documentation: up to two AMD micro instances (VM.Standard.E2.1.Micro, 1/8 OCPU and 1 GB RAM each), plus an Ampere A1 Arm allocation you can shape freely — currently 2 OCPUs and 12 GB of memory in total (one or two VM.Standard.A1.Flex instances), 200 GB of Always Free block storage (used for boot volumes; 47–50 GB minimum per instance), 10 GB of object storage plus 10 GB of archive storage, 10 TB of outbound data transfer per month, and two Always Free Autonomous Database instances (Autonomous Data Warehouse or Autonomous Transaction Processing) with 20 GB each. The Always Free list also includes a flexible load balancer and network load balancer, Site-to-Site VPN, HeatWave, NoSQL (Phoenix region), APEX, Resource Manager (Terraform), monitoring, notifications, logging, APM, Vault, bastions, security advisor, VCNs, and email delivery.

We want to flag one thing immediately, because it changes the arithmetic: in July 2026 Oracle quietly halved the Always Free Ampere A1 allowance from 4 OCPUs and 24 GB of RAM to 2 OCPUs and 12 GB, with no public announcement — a change caught by observers and now reflected in Oracle's own Always Free documentation (1,500 OCPU-hours and 9,000 GB-hours per month for free-tier tenancies; paid tenancies still get the larger 3,000 OCPU-hour / 18,000 GB-hour monthly allowance). Free tiers are marketing budgets, not contracts. Build accordingly.

Pricing: what you really pay

For the Always Free resources: nothing, for the life of the account. The trial credits cover 30 days of everything else. After that, you either stay on Always Free (and pay nothing) or convert to Pay As You Go and pay only for usage above the free allowances — metered at OCI's published rates (for reference, Ampere A1 capacity beyond the free allowance lists at $0.013106 per OCPU-hour and $0.0019659 per GB-hour of memory).

Two costs that are not money matter here. First, signup: Oracle requires a credit or debit card that functions like a credit card for identity verification (temporary authorization holds, released by your bank in three to five days; PIN-based debit, virtual, single-use and prepaid cards are not accepted). Some recognised users — Oracle Academy members, certain event attendees, prospects already engaged with sales — can sign up without a card, but for most people a card is mandatory. The claim that "no credit card is required" is wrong and we have corrected our database entry. Second, support: Always Free-only customers are not eligible for Oracle Support — community forums only. Free Tier does not include any SLA either, in Oracle's own words.

There are also housekeeping rules with teeth: one free account per person, accurate contact and billing information required, and accounts idle for 30 days or more may be deemed abandoned and suspended or terminated. Trial resources are deleted after a 30-day grace period if you don't upgrade; Always Free resources are not reclaimed. In our view the pricing is unmatched on paper — an always-free Arm VM with 2 OCPUs/12 GB, 200 GB of block storage, two managed databases and 10 TB of egress costs literally zero — and the fine print is mostly about preventing abuse rather than extracting money. Just know that "free" here is measured in availability risk and self-reliance, not euros.

Performance & infrastructure

OCI is a first-tier hyperscaler: 50+ public cloud regions across 28 countries, each offering 200+ services, with commercial regions in North America (Ashburn, Chicago, Phoenix, San Jose, Montreal, Toronto, Querétaro, Monterrey), South America (São Paulo, Vinhedo, Santiago, Valparaíso, Bogotá), Europe (Frankfurt, Paris, Marseille, Milan, Turin, Amsterdam, Madrid, Stockholm, Zurich, London, Newport, Jovanovac), the Middle East and Africa (Jerusalem, Casablanca, Jeddah, Riyadh, Johannesburg, Dubai, Abu Dhabi), and Asia-Pacific (Tokyo, Seoul, Singapore, Sydney, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Melbourne, Osaka) — plus sovereign, government, and multicloud (Database@AWS/Azure/Google Cloud) variants. Always Free resources are available in the home region of your tenancy (with carve-outs, e.g. Ampere A1 cannot be created in Seoul's Chuncheon availability domain).

The free compute is not a toy. Ampere Altra A1 cores with a flexible shape (1–80 OCPUs, 1–512 GB) are the same shapes paid customers run, and the Arm ecosystem — Docker, most language runtimes, databases — is mature enough in 2026 that compatibility friction is a minor issue. The AMD micro instances (1/8 OCPU, 1 GB) are genuinely marginal and mostly useful for small always-on utilities. Storage is OCI Block Volume backed boot volumes; object storage supports the native API plus an Amazon S3 Compatibility API and Swift, with dual-stack IPv6 endpoints available (a nice detail for IPv6-native setups). Networking includes VCNs, security lists, load balancers and VPN — the full OCI model, not a sandbox.

Reliability of the underlying platform is what you would expect from a hyperscaler that sells 99.95% SLAs on paid services — but note the careful wording: the Free Tier itself carries no SLA, and free accounts can face capacity constraints (Oracle states free-tier availability is subject to capacity limits, and region availability at signup may differ). We have not benchmarked Always Free instances; our /benchmarks series covers other providers, and free-tier performance is deliberately not guaranteed capacity.

Where it falls short

Support and recourse are the real gap. No SLA, no Oracle Support for Always Free users, forums only. When an Always Free instance disappears into a capacity problem or an account gets flagged by the automated abuse systems, you are on your own with documentation and community posts. Combined with the July 2026 silent halving of the A1 allowance, the picture is clear: the free tier's terms can change without notice and without recourse.

Second, operational roughness. The OCI console and IAM model are powerful and genuinely confusing to newcomers — tenancies, compartments, policies, regions and home regions are all concepts you must learn before the first VM launches. Out-of-stock capacity for the popular free shapes in busy regions (Ashburn, Frankfurt, Tokyo) is a recurring community complaint; users often have to retry across regions or availability domains. Signup itself has friction: card verification, identity checks, and occasionally manual review.

Third, the specifics of "always free" are tighter than the headline. 2 OCPUs/12 GB is shared across all your A1 instances; the 200 GB block allowance is consumed by boot volumes (two micro VMs plus one A1 VM with default boot disks barely fit); the 10 GB object storage is small; the two Autonomous Databases cap at 20 GB each; and outbound transfer beyond 10 TB is billed. The free compute is not burstable capacity — it is fixed allocation, and it is not enough for anything beyond small production workloads.

Finally, account risk. One account per person is enforced, idle accounts can be reclaimed, and reports of accounts being suspended by automated systems are common enough that we would not anchor anything business-critical on Always Free alone without a backup plan.

Who should pick this

We would pick Oracle Cloud Free Tier for developers, students, and hobbyists who want real always-on infrastructure at zero cost: personal projects, bots, small APIs, CI runners, ARM build boxes, learning Kubernetes and Terraform against a real cloud, and side-project databases that need a genuinely managed engine (the free Autonomous Database is remarkable in this bracket). Small teams prototyping before committing budget get a full hyperscaler to test against, and the $300 trial credits are enough to exercise GPU and larger shapes before deciding.

We would not pick it as the foundation of a business-critical service: no SLA, no support, changeable terms, and capacity uncertainty are disqualifiers for anything whose downtime costs money. For that, use the same OCI platform on Pay As You Go — or a provider whose free tier is contractually stable. Our /category/vps-providers comparison has the paid alternatives we rate for reliability.

Key takeaways

• The most generous perpetual free tier from any major cloud: Ampere A1 (2 OCPUs / 12 GB as of 2026), 2 AMD micro VMs, 200 GB block storage, 10 TB egress/month, two 20 GB Autonomous Databases — forever, plus a $300/30-day trial.
• Oracle halved the A1 allowance (4 OCPUs/24 GB → 2/12) in July 2026 without announcement — free-tier terms are marketing budgets, not contracts.
• Runs on real hyperscaler infrastructure: 50+ regions in 28 countries, full VCN networking, S3-compatible object storage, IPv6 dual-stack endpoints.
• No SLA and no Oracle Support for Always Free accounts (forums only); accounts idle 30+ days may be reclaimed; one account per person.
• A credit or debit card is required for identity verification at signup for most users — the "no credit card needed" claim is false.
• Full OCI console/IAM complexity applies; free-shape capacity in popular regions is frequently out of stock.

Sources

• https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/
• https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/faq/
• https://www.oracle.com/cloud/public-cloud-regions/
• http://docs.oracle.com/iaas/Content/FreeTier/freetier_topic-Always_Free_Resources.htm
• https://www.oracle.com/corporate/pressrelease/oow19-oracle-free-tier-091619.html
• https://blogs.oracle.com/database/freedom-to-build-announcing-oracle-cloud-free-tier-with-new-always-free-services-and-always-free-oracle-autonomous-database
• https://www.oracle.com/cloud/price-list/
• https://docs.cloud.oracle.com/iaas/Content/Object/Tasks/s3compatibleapi.htm
• https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/Object/Concepts/use-ipv6-urls.htm
• https://www.infoq.com/news/2026/07/oracle-cloud-free-tier-limits
• https://linkedin.com/company/oracle