Cloud Compute Radar

What Does the Oracle Cloud Free Tier Actually Give You in 2026?

Published 2026-09-16 · Researched and price-checked on official sources

Oracle Cloud Free Tier still hands out 2 OCPUs and 12 GB of Arm memory, two AMD micro VMs, 200 GB of block storage and 10 TB of monthly egress at no cost. Oracle cut the Arm allowance from 4 OCPUs and 24 GB on 15 June 2026 without announcing it.

Key facts

What matters

Arm allowance: 1,500 OCPU hours and 9,000 GB hours per month, which Oracle equates to 2 OCPUs and 12 GB running continuously. It was 4 OCPUs and 24 GB until 15 June 2026.
AMD allowance: two VM.Standard.E2.1.Micro instances, 1 GB of RAM each, up to 50 Mbps of internet bandwidth, 480 Mbps inside the region.
Storage and network: 200 GB of block volume combined with boot volumes, 20 GB of object storage, one 10 Mbps flexible load balancer and 10 TB of outbound data per month.
Oracle may reclaim an Always Free instance whose 95th-percentile CPU, network and memory use all stay under 20% for 7 days, and may suspend accounts idle for 30 days.
Always-Free-only accounts get no SLA and no Oracle Support tickets. Google's free tier gives 1 e2-micro VM and 1 GB of monthly egress; AWS now runs on 6-month signup credits.

What the Oracle Cloud Free Tier includes today

Oracle's Always Free Resources page is the only complete list, and it splits into two very different halves: infrastructure you can keep, and a 30-day trial of everything else. The trial half is US$300 of credit that expires after 30 days. The Always Free half never expires, but every resource has to live in your tenancy's home region.

Compute. Two AMD micro instances on the VM.Standard.E2.1.Micro shape, each with an eighth of an OCPU, 1 GB of RAM and up to 50 Mbps over the internet. Then the Arm fleet: up to two OCI Ampere A1 instances drawing on 1,500 OCPU hours and 9,000 GB hours per month. Oracle's own wording is that this equals 2 OCPUs and 12 GB of memory for an Always Free tenancy, so a single always-on box tops out at 2 cores and 12 GB.

Storage. 200 GB of block volume shared between boot volumes and attached volumes, plus five volume backups. Object and Archive Storage add 20 GB combined across the Standard, Infrequent Access and Archive tiers with 50,000 API requests per month, and Vault adds 150 secrets.

Network and extras. One flexible load balancer capped at 10 Mbps, one network load balancer, 50 site-to-site IPSec connections, 10 GB per month of VCN flow logs, 10 TB of outbound data transfer, 3,000 free emails per month through Email Delivery, and free Bastion access.

Databases. Two Always Free Autonomous AI Databases at 1 OCPU and 20 GB each with 20 concurrent sessions, a single-node MySQL HeatWave with 50 GB of storage plus 50 GB of backups, and a NoSQL database with 3 tables of 25 GB and 133 million reads and writes each per month.

The Arm cut Oracle made without telling anyone

Until 15 June 2026 the Always Free Arm allowance was 3,000 OCPU hours and 18,000 GB hours per month, the equivalent of 4 OCPUs and 24 GB running continuously. Oracle halved it to 1,500 OCPU hours and 9,000 GB hours and updated the documentation without a blog post, an email or a support notice, as InfoQ reported in July 2026.

InfoQ notes that users found out the hard way, either when their instances were shut down or when somebody spotted the changed numbers on Oracle's site. The fallout also hit Pay As You Go customers, who had upgraded specifically to make instance provisioning easier but still leaned on Always Free capacity for part of their footprint. The quiet change matters beyond the lost gigabyte count: it establishes that the terms of the free tier are a one-line documentation edit away from changing.

That is the context the September news adds. Oracle is in the middle of a restructuring it has put at roughly US$2.8 billion, after a 13% workforce decline in fiscal 2026, with another round of terminations landing on 14 September 2026, per Tech Times. Nothing in Oracle's documentation says the free tier is being withdrawn. The documented record says the allowance can shrink silently, and once did.

The catches the free-tier lists skip

Oracle documents its survival rules, but they sit below the resource tables where roundups tend not to look.

Idle reclamation. Oracle may reclaim an Always Free instance if, across a 7-day window, 95th-percentile CPU utilisation is under 20%, network utilisation is under 20%, and memory utilisation is under 20% (the memory test applies to A1 shapes). A personal VPN node, a monitoring box or a staging server can sit under all three thresholds indefinitely.
Over-allocated Arm instances get deleted. If your tenancy holds more Ampere A1 capacity than the free allowance, every A1 instance is disabled and then deleted after 30 days unless you upgrade to a paid account. Oracle's own advice is to trim to 2 OCPUs and 12 GB before the trial ends.
Trial-end data loss. When a trial expires with more than 20 GB in Object Storage, Oracle deletes the objects; the account then drops to the combined 20 GB Always Free limit.
Thirty days of silence can cost the account. Oracle's Free Tier FAQ says accounts left idle for 30 days or more may be treated as abandoned and become eligible for suspension or termination, and that only one Free Trial or Always Free account is allowed per person.
No SLA, no support engineers. Always Free services carry no service level agreement. Customers using only Always Free resources are not eligible for Oracle Support and cannot raise a service request.
Port 25 is blocked. Tenancies cannot send mail over outbound TCP port 25 without a service-limit exemption, so a mail server is off the table.
Home region only, and a card on file. Compute and Autonomous AI Database must be created in the home region, Free Tier tenancies are limited to 2 virtual cloud networks, and signup needs a mobile number plus a credit or debit card for identity checks. Prepaid, virtual and single-use cards are refused.

Oracle vs Google Cloud vs AWS free tiers

The three hyperscaler free tiers are not interchangeable, and the gap is widest in egress. Oracle's 10 TB per month is the equivalent of a small production workload leaving the building for free. Google's free tier allows 1 GB of outbound data transfer per month from North America, which one busy afternoon of downloads can exhaust.

Trial credits diverge too. Oracle gives US$300 valid for 30 days. Google's $300 Welcome credit runs for 90 days. AWS has moved new accounts onto a credit-based Free plan: $100 on signup plus up to $100 more, for up to 6 months, after which the account closes on its own unless it converts to paid, according to AWS's free tier page. The permanent always-free list AWS keeps is service-level, not the 12-core equivalent of a permanent VM.

When $21.99 a year beats free

A free Arm box with 12 GB of RAM and 10 TB of egress is genuinely hard to beat on paper. The risk is not price, it is tenure: the allowance can be halved, an idle instance can be reclaimed, and a quiet month can put the whole account into abandonment territory.

Match the tier to the workload. Learning, Jupyter notebooks, Terraform practice, a short-lived API for a client demo and CI jobs that actually run all suit Oracle well, because sustained utilisation is exactly what the idle rules reward. Always-on low-traffic services do not. For a WireGuard node, a small mail relay or a backup target that mostly sleeps, the predictable option is a cheap paid VPS: RackNerd's specials page lists a 1 GB KVM VPS with 1 vCPU core, 20 GB of SSD storage and 3 TB of monthly transfer at $21.99 per year, with no idleness clause attached to it. That is under $2 a month for a machine whose terms nobody can edit from a documentation commit.

If you do stay on Oracle, treat the 20% idle thresholds as a design constraint. Give the instance real work, enable a monitoring agent, and keep a configuration script somewhere outside the tenancy so a reclaimed VM is a rebuild rather than a rebuild plus archaeology.

At a glance

Provider	Always-free compute	Free storage	Monthly egress	Main catch
Oracle Cloud Free Tier	2 Arm Ampere A1 OCPUs and 12 GB RAM (1,500 OCPU hours / 9,000 GB hours a month), plus 2 AMD micro VMs at 1 GB each	200 GB block volume, 20 GB object storage	10 TB	Idle instances can be reclaimed; Arm allowance halved on 15 June 2026
Google Cloud Free Tier	1 e2-micro VM in us-west1, us-central1 or us-east1	30 GB-months standard persistent disk	1 GB from North America	Tiny egress allowance; no Arm capacity
AWS Free Tier	No permanent free VM: $100 credit on signup plus up to $100 more, for up to 6 months	Funded by the same credits	Funded by credits	Account closes after 6 months unless you convert to a paid plan
RackNerd 1 GB KVM VPS (paid)	1 vCPU core, 1 GB RAM	20 GB SSD	3 TB	$21.99 per year, no idle-reclamation policy

Free-tier compute compared: verified 16 September 2026

FAQ

Is the Oracle Cloud Free Tier really free forever?

Oracle's own FAQ describes Always Free services as available for an unlimited period. In practice the offer is permanent until Oracle changes it, and it did change: the Arm allowance was halved on 15 June 2026 with no public announcement. Always Free services also carry no SLA, and an Always-Free-only account cannot open Oracle Support tickets.

Why was my Oracle Always Free instance stopped or reclaimed?

Two documented rules cover most cases. Oracle may reclaim an instance whose 95th-percentile CPU, network and memory utilisation all stay below 20% over a 7-day window, and any Ampere A1 capacity above the free allowance is disabled, then deleted after 30 days, if the account stays on a free plan. Accounts idle for 30 days or more may also be treated as abandoned.

Is the Oracle Cloud Free Tier better than Google Cloud's free tier?

For resources, yes: Oracle gives 12 GB of Arm RAM and 10 TB of monthly egress against Google's single e2-micro instance with 30 GB-months of disk and 1 GB of outbound transfer. For predictability, Google wins, because it has no idle-reclamation clause. Google's trial credit is also more usable, $300 across 90 days versus Oracle's $300 across 30.