Oracle’s “Always Free” tier used to be quietly exceptional. While AWS and GCP were dangling tiny free instances in front of you, Oracle was handing out 4 vCPUs and 24 GB of RAM on Ampere A1 ARM compute. For free. Always.
That changed. Confirmed by Oracle support, and picked up on Reddit.
What was there #
The OCI Always Free tier included, among other things, up to 4 OCPUs and 24 GB of memory across Ampere A1 ARM instances. You could split that however you liked; one big VM, four small ones, a combination. For homelabbers and self-hosters it was genuinely useful compute. I know people running Nextcloud, Pi-hole, small Kubernetes clusters, and personal projects entirely on that allocation.
It wasn’t a trial. It wasn’t a 12-month honeymoon period. It was marketed as always free.
What changed #
Oracle have cut the Always Free Ampere A1 allocation to 2 OCPUs and 12 GB of memory.
Half the compute. Half the memory.
No fanfare. No migration path handed to you. If you were running workloads sized to the old limits, you’re now over quota.
Why this matters #
The appeal of the OCI free tier wasn’t just the numbers, it was the promise. “Always Free” has a specific meaning. When that label is attached to a resource allocation, the implicit contract is that Oracle won’t pull the rug. They’ve now pulled half of it.
Every cloud provider has free tiers partly as a loss leader, partly to hook you into their ecosystem, partly as a genuine goodwill gesture. The maths change. Business decisions get made. I get it.
But the framing of “Always Free” is what stings. It set expectations that Oracle has now quietly walked back. There was no loud announcement. If you weren’t paying attention, you may find an unexpected bill.
What you can do #
Your options are roughly:
- Downsize your workloads to fit within the new 2 vCPU / 12 GB limit.
- Pay up and move to a paid tier if the workload justifies it.
- Move somewhere else. Hetzner, Vultr, and a handful of smaller providers have very competitive paid tiers that aren’t much more than “free” when you factor in your time.
If you were running anything meaningful on OCI’s free tier, now is a good time to audit your setup and make a deliberate choice rather than wait for something to break.
The broader lesson #
Cloud provider free tiers are a product decision, not a promise. Even when they say “always.” The only infrastructure you truly control is infrastructure you pay for, or infrastructure you own. Everything else is borrowed.
This isn’t an OCI-specific problem. AWS has quietly deprecated free tier services before. Google shut down Google Domains after promising a stable home for domains. The pattern repeats.
Build accordingly. Assume the floor can move.
Oracle’s OCI is still a decent platform and the remaining free tier isn’t nothing, 2 vCPUs and 12 GB is still more than most providers offer for free. But it’s half of what it was, and the way it happened is a reminder that “always” in cloud marketing means “until it doesn’t.”
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