Resources // Cloud Providers
Oracle Cloud Free Tier
- High-value
Offer Always-free Arm VMs and 2 free DBs
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Updated Jun 2026
The offer
- $300 in free credits for a 30-day trial, usable across all eligible OCI services
- Always Free (no time limit): Arm Ampere A1 and AMD compute. Oracle cut this to ~2 vCPU / 12 GB on 2026-06-15 (down from 4 Arm cores / 24 GB), plus 2 Autonomous Databases, 200 GB block storage, object/archive storage, a load balancer, and 10 TB/month egress
- After the 30-day trial you drop to Always Free, or move to Pay As You Go and pay only for usage above the free limits
- The branded "Oracle for Startups" credits accelerator is no longer on Oracle's own pages. What is live is the free tier ($300 trial plus Always Free)
Who qualifies
- Open to anyone: no startup status, incorporation, or VC backing required
- A real credit/debit card is needed at signup for identity verification (no prepaid or virtual cards); the $300 trial is limited to select countries
- Idle Always Free compute can be reclaimed if CPU, network, and memory all stay under 20% over a 7-day window
- One account per person; multi-account creation is prohibited
Community Insights
Developers rate OCI’s Always Free tier as the most generous free compute around. People routinely run k3s clusters, VPNs, and self-hosted apps on the Arm Ampere VMs. The praise comes wrapped in distrust of Oracle as a company and real operational gotchas: idle instances get reclaimed unless you keep utilization up or convert to Pay As You Go, capacity for free Arm shapes is often unavailable, and as of June 2026 Oracle halved the free allocation, which many read as confirmation that “always free” means “free until we change our mind.”
Best Practices (from community tips)
- Convert to Pay As You Go right after signup. It stops idle-instance reclamation while keeping you free as long as you stay within the Always Free limits.
- If you stay on pure Free Tier, keep instances above the 20% threshold (a light cron job) to avoid reclamation.
- Provision Arm Ampere A1 early and in a less-crowded region. Out-of-capacity errors on free Arm shapes are common.
- Re-check your footprint against the post-2026-06-15 limits (~2 vCPU / 12 GB) or you may start getting billed.
- Use Terraform / OpenTofu so you can rebuild elsewhere fast; treat OCI free as disposable, not your only home.
- Spend the $300 trial deliberately within the 30-day window (GPU or higher-tier DB testing), since it evaporates after.