Oracle Halves Its Always Free ARM Limits — Act Before August 18, 2026
Oracle Just Halved Its Always Free ARM Limits
Oracle is cutting its Always Free ARM compute allowance in half, from 4 OCPUs and 24 GB of RAM to 2 OCPUs and 12 GB, effective August 18, 2026. Any instances exceeding the new tenancy-wide pool will be automatically terminated. The article outlines specific actions: resize a single 4/24 instance to 2/12, terminate one of two 2/12 instances, or do nothing if you only have x86 micro instances. It warns against common mistakes like stopping instead of terminating and emphasizes backing up before any changes.
Free is the most expensive.
- SOLAR_FIELDS
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 subject to this lower limit, only Always Free users.
In other words, if you want the old provisioning limits for free you just have to put your credit card info in.
There are additional reasons that you would want to switch to PAYG - for instance, oracle will literally tear down your always free resources if you are idling them, they are watching CPU and memory and if they see them idled they will take them away. Also, even provisioning always free instances is a challenge - most people have to write bots that attempt on a regular basis, since they appear to only allow you to register when existing resources are freed up, either by the reaper referenced earlier or by someone deprovisioning their always free resources. Neither of these limitations apply on the PAYG tier
It's worth clearing up, because this amount of free resources is worth a nonzero amount of money, if you provisioned comparable resources on any of the tier 1 or tier 2 cloud's you would be paying well over $1k/year for what they are handing over for free. AWS + GCP free compute offerings are anemic […]
- caminanteblanco
A substantially better article:
https://www.infoq.com/news/2026/07/oracle-cloud-free-tier-li...
The actual Oracle docs:
https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/FreeTier/freetier...
- snailmailman
I’m mostly fine with this. Their free teir was crazy generous. 24GB of ram for free is a lot. They were a very popular host for free Minecraft servers because of it.
Their communication about this change has been pretty awful. It began with a silent change to the docs a month or so back, and a lot of people worrying that they would suddenly be charged. It looks like there’s actually a date associated with the change now at least. This article mentions an email that went out? I haven’t gotten any such email. I’ve already reduced my instances to within the upcoming limit, so maybe that’s why? I don’t know.
- arjie
They continue to be incredibly generous. 2 vCPUs and 12 GB of RAM is extraordinary for no cost.
- browningstreet
It's where I run my Hermes. C'est la vie.
If this is the first casualty of the Ellisonpocalypse I'm fine with it. May they all whither and go away.
- throwaway67743
The A1 has been available for 6 years without a rug pull or reductions until now on a very overly generous offering - whatever you think of oracle, it's something else. My instances from 2020 are still running...
- 999900000999
You pay in other ways.
You’ll spend hours upon hours trying to get a free spot. And like anything free it’s full of spam.
Your free server will likely have a blacklisted ip address.
Oracle is exceptionally frustrating to use in the first place. Pay the 5$ a month and use AWS or Digital Ocean
- gryfft
I tried getting some free ARM oracle servers a couple months back. I ended up setting up a whole PAYG setup, eventually got tired of trying to get their cloud to actually provision me any of these supposed free ARM systems, and have been a customer for a couple months now paying ~80/mo for the couple VPS's I've been playing with.
Speaking as an Oracle customer, let me heartily disrecommend them to everyone. Terrible experience.