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Comment by tombert | Hacker News Reader

I use the "Always Free" Oracle instance for a lot of my cloud stuff. It's a pretty sweet setup, with a quad core CPU and 24 gigs of RAM though I suspect that given memory prices they might start limiting that.

I use it mostly to host a Minecraft server and to host a dumb website I vibe coded to share 3D Movie Maker movies. https://showbo.at/

ETA:

Looking at downstream comments, it looks like it's limited to 12 gigs and 2 cores now. Still a pretty good deal for free but not quite as good as it used to be.

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The always free was recently cut to 12 GB RAM and 2 cores per month.

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

Interesting. I just signed into my machine and checked

    ubuntu@instance-20250824-2334:~$ free -mh
                   total        used        free      shared  buff/cach  available
    Mem:            23Gi       3.5Gi       768Mi       7.7Gi        19Gi        11Gi
    Swap:             0B          0B          0B

I must be grandfathered in to the old one. Also I really need to add a swapfile lol.

This has been communicated heavily. They will kill your instance one day soon.

Yeah, I am fine with that. What I have on there is pretty low-stakes and everything I care about on there is backed up regularly with Restic to my local server. If they decide to do murder it, that will suck, I will be annoyed for like twenty minutes, and then I shall move on. It’s not like I paid for it.

I bet if you restart it it'll apply the new limits

Always free, with 12GB and 2 cores? What's the catch?

As far as I can tell, there really isn't one. I haven't paid Oracle any money since I started and the machine appears to work fine. I think they treat these things as loss-leaders in hopes that you bother your employer to get the more expensive non-free plans.

Sweet. I will have to take a look at.

They limited the Always Free usage on a completely free account with no card attached. If you switch your account to PAYG, the Always Free instance still maxes at 4vCPUs/24GB of RAM.

Interesting!

That’s actually how I have it set up because they kept running out of capacity in the credit-card-less account and someone on Reddit mentioned that loophole.

If you are on the pay-as-you-go tier, I would check if you are being billed. Always free for the ARM instances works by giving you a certain number of hours free, so if you go past that you may get billed

But then if it still runs "out of capacity" you will be billed, right? Or you put on the credit card and then set some kind of charge limit as 0 or something?

There’s a limit of free hours per month that comes out to 2 cores and 12GB RAM. If you go over it then you get charged with the pay-as-you-go option.

It used to be 4 cores and 24GB RAM in the past for at least 4 or 5 years but it recently changed.

They kill those instances for both abuse and unuse. Mind was killed for the latter.

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