Oracle gives away more cloud infrastructure than most people realize, and the fine print is less restrictive than you might expect, as long as you know where to look.
Oracle gives away more cloud infrastructure than most people realize, and the fine print is less restrictive than you might expect, as long as you know where to look.
Oracle Cloud Free Tier is a real cloud infrastructure stack, not a fake sandbox or a symbolic single virtual machine. It splits into two buckets: a Free Trial that hands you $300 of credit for up to 30 days, and an Always Free tier that gives you long-term resources you keep as long as you stay inside quota. The Always Free tier is the part worth paying attention to, because it includes compute, storage, databases, and networking, all running on real Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
The Always Free resources are modest but genuinely useful. You get two AMD E2.1.Micro virtual machines with 1 GB of RAM each, plus an Ampere A1 Arm pool with 2 OCPUs and 12 GB of RAM. On top of that, there is 200 GB of Block Volume, 20 GB each of Object Storage and Archive Storage, two Always Free Autonomous Databases with 20 GB each, a 10 Mbps load balancer, and up to 10 TB of outbound data transfer per month. That is not a toy. It is a small but real cloud stack.
The Free Trial gives you $300 of credit to spend on any Oracle Cloud service for up to 30 days. Once that expires, the Always Free resources remain available as long as your account stays in good standing and you stay within the published quotas. You provision VMs, block volumes, databases, and load balancers through the standard Oracle Cloud console, and they behave like any paid resource, just with lower limits.
The key distinction is understanding which resources are Always Free versus which are only available during the trial. Always Free compute, storage, databases, and networking persist indefinitely. Anything beyond those quotas either consumes trial credit or requires upgrading to a paid account.
Do not confuse Free Trial with Always Free. The trial expires; Always Free does not, but it has hard limits. Host capacity and region availability can still block instance creation, even when you are within quota, because Oracle does not guarantee capacity in every region at all times. The quota is good for learning, testing, and small projects, but it is not large-scale production infrastructure. Some quotas also depend on your tenancy type and region, so the numbers you see in the documentation may not always be exactly what you can provision.
This is for developers, students, and DevOps learners who want to practice on real cloud infrastructure without spending money. It is also useful for anyone hosting a small personal website, a small API backend, or a demo database. If you need production-grade scale or guaranteed capacity, you will outgrow the free tier quickly.
The bottom line is that Oracle Cloud Free Tier is still worth using if your goal is to learn cloud with real resources. Just know the difference between the trial and the always-free tier, and do not expect it to replace paid infrastructure for anything serious.