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Discussion (71 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
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 in comparison. It's a significant amount of compute.
I don't think this is true. I just tried to sign up and it says
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Payment/Identity Verification - You will not be charged
You won’t be charged for using OCI Free Tier. If you choose to upgrade your account to Paid tier, you will only be charged for services used over your Always Free limits. If you don’t upgrade your account to Paid tier, you will continue to have access to Always Free services.
You may see a small, temporary charge on your payment method. This is a verification hold that will be removed automatically. See the FAQ for more information.
We recommend double-checking all the information before submitting the form since some info is automatically filled.
Oracle does not accept any virtual, prepaid or single use cards in payment verification.
Debit cards that have a logo (for example, Visa, Mastercard, Discover, American Express) and don't require a PIN number can be used to sign up for a free Oracle Cloud Account.
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So it does require a credit card for sign up.
Though I can also confirm the provisioning behavior for PAYG vs. trial accounts w/o payment info.
Some people say that doesn't apply to PAYG users, I do not know about that for sure, I am a PAYG user since 2021 and have not experienced any reclamation issues.
The actual Oracle docs: https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/FreeTier/freetier...
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.
Speaking as an Oracle customer, let me heartily disrecommend them to everyone. Terrible experience.
Which I imagine is what motivated this change.
I got this confirmed with a salesperson ~2yrs ago when I first set up my free tier on there.
If this is the first casualty of the Ellisonpocalypse I'm fine with it. May they all whither and go away.
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
Also, their control plane is so poorly designed, it makes AWS Console feel like good UX.
That was after my card and everything was already setup with the company. Oracle's reputation is 100% deserved.
I noticed the change to their documentation about two weeks ago. A couple days later, I checked my own account for something unrelated. My main instance (using 12 GB of RAM) was still up, but another that I only used for testing random things had just vanished from my account without a trace.
I get that they are well within their rights to reduce the Always Free resources (or even eliminate them entirely), but I did not get any notification that this was changing, nor that they would be terminating my instances that took the account above the Always Free limits. It would honestly have been _less_ sneaky (and potentially damaging) to simply start charging for resources above the new limit.
But, Oracle gonna Oracle I guess.
This is one of the rare instances where I don't really have an issue with Oracle doing something any sane business would to be honest. It's a free resource and RAM and storage have increased in cost substantially.
I don’t have an issue with the reduction, but the communication around it could have been better.
Recently wanted to make a new free instance at the lowest settings, but my zone is completely overbooked. Oracle does not let you move your free instance to a new zone.
According to what I read, the only way to spin up a new free instance is run a script elsewhere to attempt instance creation every minute using the API; and that takes an average of a couple weeks to bring something up.
With the RAM and storage costs being out of control it's odd it didn't happen long before now.
On top of that I wonder what running any kind of free service looks like when there are so many AI agents out there that could use and abuse them. Many forms of abuse that were more difficult to automate in the past can likely be monitored and restarted with an agentic loop now.
EDIT: After logging in I see a banner: "Always Free A1 Resource Limit Update
Always Free Ampere A1 Compute entitlements have changed. This update does not affect your paid resources, existing paid workloads or bill. Contact support for further questions."
It's not clear what this means for PAYG users though?
EDIT2: In th Price List it says "Each paid tenancy gets the first 3,000 OCPU hours and 18,000 GB hours per month for free to create Ampere A1 Compute instances" (https://www.oracle.com/cloud/price-list/). The word "paid" was not there before (check Wayback Machine). This would still make 4 OCPUs for PAYG customers possible. Confusing.
Were you expecting a massive evil corporation to keep spending $50 every month on you forever?
When they offer something "always"... yes? Are "always" and "forever" not synonyms?
I'm not arguing about the economics or motivation, just pointing out that simple language says that they lied.
This change is totally fair from my perspective. I see the "always free" as "you will never pay for this for as long as you keep it" as opposed to "this will always be available, and free". People who use free services like this should generally be aware that they are likely to go away or be reduced at some point. I got hit by this with PlanetScale and had to move my stuff to a self-hosted postgres.