# Oracle Cloud Free Tier 70 Hacker News commenters recommended Oracle Cloud Free Tier and 99 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 12 of 13 months; owners who said how long report a median of 3 years (16 owners). **Verdict:** People recommend its Always Free tier for generous, long-lasting free virtual machines and storage that many users never pay beyond. Critics most often cite unannounced cuts to free limits and deleted or reclaimed idle instances. ## Why people recommend it - Generous free tier resources (8 comments): "it's literally free... and it's still free. Compare the new 2vCPU/12GB RAM offering to Linode, Vultr, DigitalOcean, ec. It's still incredibly generous." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49194115)) "I would never give oracle a cent of my money but when they are offering 26gb of compute in always-free tier I'll take every bit of it" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47242102)) "In Oracle Cloud’s PAYGO always free tier you get 4x6GB vps you can run managed kubernetes on." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50017141)) - Free instances running for years (7 comments): "I've been using my full quota of free resources for 3+ years without an issue and I'm grateful for having a place to run various non-commercial services" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49188051)) "I've had several permanent Arm-VPSes running in OCI for almost 4 years, without paying a single cent." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49186752)) "I've been running instances for many years and never had an issue spinning a new one up." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49185162)) - Good for side projects and proxies (6 comments): "Still great value though, have my app's website and associated infra on one of those 4CPU/24GB in "pay-as-you-go" mode and never ever reached the paying threshold." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50018582)) "I've been doing that for years: free tier Oracle VPS purely as an SSL termination+WireGuard endpoint" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48431416)) "I just cut my Hetzner bill by $4/mo by moving my Umami box to one of the free Oracle Cloud VPS" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46306538)) - Lower costs than major clouds (4 comments): "Overall we reduced our cloud spend (even accounting for the additional staff) by about 40%." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47295643)) "OCI is just technically better than every other cloud, always was. And cheaper." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49185259)) "Oracle doesn't charge for IOPS on OCI the way AWS would for an Oracle instance" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50013170)) ## What people warn about - Limits changed without notice (5 comments): "They might have decided to try their luck and see how many people will fall victim to their scummy tactics of not informing the users." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48525896)) "If you take a service that you told someone was "always free" and start charging them for that, that's a lie." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49213341)) "I did not get any notification that this was changing, nor that they would be terminating my instances" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49185129)) - Idle instances or accounts deleted (4 comments): "Neither of these limitations apply on the PAYG tier" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49185354)) "their tendency to delete accounts haphazardly with no obvious pattern" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49186503)) "can they reduce my nice free VM to 32k of ram and a 1/1000 of a core" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49184883)) - Trouble provisioning free ARM instances (2 comments): "it always went to some sort of verification that after some time ended up in a rejection with no follow up process" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49186634)) "eventually got tired of trying to get their cloud to actually provision me any of these supposed free ARM systems" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49185687)) - Poor, confusing user interface (2 comments): "far and away the most awful cloud related UI of any variety I've ever used" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49189789)) "Similar experience. It was surreal coming from the (relatively) simple waters of Azure and Digital Ocean." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48912362)) ## Alternatives hackers recommend - [Amazon Web Services (AWS)](https://hackerapproved.com/p/amazon-web-services.md): 248 recommend - [Google Cloud](https://hackerapproved.com/p/google-cloud-platform.md): 161 recommend - [Microsoft Azure](https://hackerapproved.com/p/microsoft-azure.md): 153 recommend - [Scaleway](https://hackerapproved.com/p/scaleway.md): 70 recommend - [OVHcloud](https://hackerapproved.com/p/ovhcloud.md): 16 recommend ## Where to get it - [Visit the official site](https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/) ## Cite as Hacker Approved, "Oracle Cloud Free Tier", https://hackerapproved.com/p/oracle-cloud/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).