Souls really don't go for much nowadays, do they. Faustian bargains used to at least get you some magic powers and renewed youth.

"I sold my soul and all I got was a $5 virtual machine"

The difficulty with the "sold your soul" meme is that preserving your soul is a moving target. I've got some Oracle free tier instances. They get deployed with nixos-rebuild, same as anything else. The main difference between them and any other virtual server provider is when I've got to do something that requires logging in to the overwrought web interface, it's slightly less friendly than other providers (the IP config is a bit weird, too).

Using an offering from a specific company is not selling your soul. Selling your soul entails adopting something in a way that you become reliant upon it, giving whomever controls it leverage over you. The chief one these days is using Proprietary Software 2.0, and especially writing significant code that ends up inextricably wed to it. That can include the Oracle Cloud API, but it also includes every other lock-in-hopeful proprietary service API, including all of these "easy" and "free tier" offerings from not-yet-openly-associated-with-evil SaaS "startups".

So in short if you're choosing between some proprietary solution that offers "free" hosting (eg Heroku, Github pages, anything "serverless", etc) and Oracle free tier that gives you bog standard VMs on which you can run common libre software, choose the Oracle free tier route and don't think twice. If Oracle engages in "altering the deal", then the most you'll be on the hook for is $5/mo at a different provider rather than having to completely redo your setup.

Oracle cloud is suspiciously good. They also claim not to do the AWS thing: if you exceed the free limits, they'll just shut you down rather than bill you absurd amounts of money. I guess that's reserved for the Java and DB billing divisions.

Their free tier gives you quite a lot of disk. The catch is being capped at 10Mbit, which can be mitigated by .. Cloudflare!

Good times. I'm on Oracle too but now they decided to charge me for "compute" and nothing changed at my server :(

Time to jump ship

The last time I tried, I couldn't get a VM running for whatever reason. Any issues with OC?

So it cost you everything...

I tried it, and man is it just the worst interface in the world. $50/yr for a cheap VPS from somewhere else was worth it to me.