Oracle cut its Always Free ARM limits to 2 OCPU / 12GB, enforced Aug 18 • Hacker News Board

Re: Oracle cut its Always Free ARM limits to 2 OCPU / 12GB, enforced Aug 18

#131

Post by Gander5739 » Thu, Aug 06, 2026, 4:01 PM UTC

frollogaston wrote: post #125

wastedpotencial wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been on the free tier 1vCPU x86 / 1GB RAM for years and it was a perfect experience. I recently upgraded to the 4/24, and indeed you need to change to PAYG or otherwise it's out of capacity, but still no problem and within the free limits. For your use case, if the 1/1 instance is enough, I highly recommend Oracle and it's not something I imagined myself saying.

Thanks, that might still be useful for me. I did want more RAM to make it equivalent to my 4GB RPi, but 1GB is enough to at least act as a relay server.

You might find this guide helpful: https://guides.viren070.me/selfhosting/oracle

Re: Oracle cut its Always Free ARM limits to 2 OCPU / 12GB, enforced Aug 18

#132

Post by freak42 » Fri, Aug 07, 2026, 5:34 AM UTC

47282847 wrote: post #73

freak42 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that's not what's happening: People took the always free offer, but the offer they took ends now for them not just for new users.

“Always free ice cream” doesn’t guarantee the same flavors and amount per serving.

We're not talking about ice cream.

Re: Oracle cut its Always Free ARM limits to 2 OCPU / 12GB, enforced Aug 18

#133

Post by ajross » Fri, Aug 07, 2026, 5:02 PM UTC

inigyou wrote: post #98

ajross wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Expecting someone to lie doesn't mean rolling over and refusing to acknowledge it. Not unlike people making the expected reactionary cynical commentary on internet forums still demands a response. I mean, you're very perceptive! But that's not very interesting, it's sort of the price of admission here at HN. Oracle lying in its product naming is more so.

When Amazon says something is always free in the free tier, it's opposite things that are free for the first 12 months of your account.

But... does Amazon say things in their free tier are "always" free? I don't think they do. This was an Oracle lie.

If you take a service that you told someone was "always free" and start charging them for that, that's a lie. It just is. I'm gobsmacked that this community views this as acceptable marketing. Is this the moral foundation of our new era of startup overlords?

Re: Oracle cut its Always Free ARM limits to 2 OCPU / 12GB, enforced Aug 18

#134

Post by randomblock1 » Fri, Aug 07, 2026, 8:32 PM UTC

SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #37

For what it's worth, I am a user of this and I'd like to clear up one thing that is not obvious here: There are actually two tiers of Free here that Oracle offers. Always Free - No credit card required, sign up. This is what the new limit applies to PAYG - You give a credit card, but like AWS and GCP there is a "free" tier for people who are on pay as you go plans. From what I can tell, the PAYG subscribers are not s…

> afaik the PAYG subscribers are not subject to this lower limit ... In other words, if you want the old provisioning limits for free you just have to put your credit card info in.

Always Free can mean different things: to a tenancy like you're describing, or to resources, where it describes the amount of resources you can use for free before you start getting charged money.

https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/FreeTier/freetier...

> All Oracle Cloud Infrastructure accounts (whether free or paid) have a set of resources that are free of charge ... These resources display the Always Free-eligible label

> All tenancies get a set of Always Free resources in the Compute service ... All tenancies get the first 1,500 OCPU hours and 9,000 GB hours per month for free for VM instances using the VM.Standard.A1.Flex shape.

That's for all tenancies, and calculates to 2 OCPUs and 12GB per month. So sure, the provisioning _limits_ go up for PAYG tenancies, but using them certainly ain't free! If you have a 4/24 VM you have to downsize it if you don't want to be charged for it.