One thing to watch out for is that you pick your "home region" when you create your account. This cannot be changed later, and your "Always Free" instances can only be created in your home region (the non-free tier doesn't have that restriction).

So choose your home region carefully. Also, note that some regions have multiple availability domains (OCI-speak for availability zones) but some only have one AD. Though if you're only running one free instance then ADs don't really matter.

A bit of a nitpick. You get monthly credit for 4c/24gb on ARM, no matter the region. So even if you chose your home region poorly, you can run those instances in any region and only be on the hook for the disk cost. I found this all out the hard way, so I'm paying $2/month to oracle for my disks.

I don't know the details but I know I made this mistake and I still have my Free Tier instances hosted in a different region then my home. It's charged me a month of $1 already so I'm pretty sure it's working.

the catch is: no commercial usage and half the time you try to spin up an instance itll tell you theres no room left

That limitation (spinning up an instance) only exists if you don't put a payment card in. If you put a payment card in, it goes away immediately. You don't have to actually pay anything, you can provision the always free resources, but obviously in this regard you have to ensure that you don't accidentally provision something with cost. I used terraform to make my little kube cluster on there and have not had a cost event at all in over 1.5 years. I think at one point I accidentally provisioned a volume or something and it cost me like one cent.

> no commercial usage

I think that's if you are literally on their free tier, vs. having a billable account which doesn't accumulate enough charges to be billed.

Similar to the sibling comment - you add a credit card and set yourself up to be billed (which removes you from the "free tier"), but you are still granted the resources monthly for free. If you exceed your allocation, they bill the difference.

Honestly I’m surprised they even let you provision the resources without a payment card. Seems ripe for abuse

A credit card is required for sign up but it won't be set up as a billing card until you add it. One curious thing they do is though, the free trial is the only entry way to create a new cloud account. You can't become a nonfree customer from the get go. This is weird because their free trial signup is horrible. The free trial is in very high demand so understandably they refuse a lot of accounts which they would probably like as nonfree customers.

I would presume account sign up is a loss leader in order to get ~spam~ marketing leads, and that they don't accept mailinator domains

They also, like many other cloud providers, need a real physical payment card. No privacy.com stuff. No virtual cards. Of course they don’t tell you this outright, because obscurity fraud blah blah blah, but if you try to use any type of virtual card it’s gonna get rejected. And if your naïve ass thought you could pay with the virtual card you’ll get a nice lesson in how cloud providers deal with fraud. They’ll never tell you that virtual cards aren’t allowed, because something something fraud, your payment will just mysteriously fail and you’ll get no guidance as to what went wrong and you have to basically guess it out.

This is basically any cloud provider by the way, not specific to Oracle. Ran into this with GCP recently. Insane experience. Pay with card. Get payment rejected by fraud team after several months of successful same amount payments on the same card and they won’t tell what the problem is. They ask for verification. Provide all sorts of verification. On the sixth attempt, send a picture of a physical card and all holds removed immediately

It’s such a perfect microcosm capturing of dealing with megacorps today. During that whole ordeal it was painfully obvious that the fraud team on the other side were telling me to recite the correct incantation to pass their filters, but they weren’t allowed to tell me what the incantation was. Only the signals they sent me and some educated guesswork were able to get me over the hurdle

> send a picture of a physical card and all holds removed immediately

So you're saying there's a chance to use a prepaid card if you can copy it's digits onto a real looking plastic card? Lol

Unironically yes. The (real) physical card I provided was a very cheap looking one. They didn’t seem to care much about its look but rather the physicality of it

Using AWS with virtual debit cards all right. Revolut cards work fine for me. What may also be a differentiator: Phone number used for registration is registered also for an account already having an established track record, and has a physical card for payments. (just guessing)

>No privacy.com stuff. No virtual cards.

I used a privacy.com Mastercard linked to my bank account for Oracle's payment method to upgrade to PAYG. It may have changed, this was a few months ago. Set limit to 100, they charged and reverted $100.

There are tons of horror stories about OCI's free tier (check r/oraclecloud on reddit, tl;dr: your account may get terminated at any moment and you will lose access to all data with no recovery options). I wouldn't suggest putting anything serious on it.

They will not even bother sending you an email explaining why, and you will not be able to ask it, because the system will just say your password is incorrect when you try to login or reset it.

If you are on free tier, they have nothing to lose, only you, so be particular mindful of making a calendar note for changing your CC before expiration and things like that.

It’s worth paying for another company just for the peace of mind of knowing they will try to persuade you to pay before deleting your data.

Are all of those stories related to people who use it without putting any payment card in? I’ve been happily siphoning Larry Ellisons jet fuel pennies for a good year and a half now and have none of these issues because I put a payment card in

Be careful about putting a payment card in too.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42902190

which links to:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29514359 & https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33202371

Good call out. I used the machines defined here and have never had any sort of issue like those links describe: https://github.com/jpetazzo/ampernetacle

Nope, my payment method was already entered.

IME, the vast majority of those horror stories end up being from people who stay in the "trial" tier and don't sign up for pay-as-you-go (one extra, easy step) and Oracle's ToS make it clear that trial accounts an resources can and do get terminated at any time. And at least some of those people admitted, with some prodding, that they were also trying to do torrents or VPNs to get around geographical restrictions.

But yes, you should always have good backups and a plan B with any hosting/cloud provider you choose.

Can confirm (old comment of mine saying the same https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43215430)

I recenlty wrote a guide on how to create a free 3 node cluster in Oracle cloud : https://macgain.net/posts/free-k8-cluster . This guide currently uses kubeadm to create 3 node (1 control plane, 2 worker nodes) cluster.