Oracle's Always Free tier in 2026: the 24 GB ARM deal is quietly gone

Published 2026-10-08

Oracle Cloud’s Always Free tier is legendary among self-hosters: a free ARM VM powerful enough to run real workloads, forever. The legend says 4 OCPUs and 24 GB of RAM.

The legend is out of date. Oracle’s current Always Free documentation specifies 1,500 OCPU-hours and 9,000 GB-hours per month for Ampere A1 instances — which for an Always Free tenancy works out to 2 OCPUs and 12 GB of RAM running continuously. Exactly half the famous number.

Thousands of tutorials, Reddit threads, and YouTube videos still cite 4/24. If you signed up expecting that, this is what you’ll actually find.

What you actually get (verified against official docs, 2026-10-08)

Even halved, nothing else on the market is close. A 2-core/12 GB ARM VM with 10 TB egress would cost $25-50/month anywhere else. For context: every PaaS free tier we track gives you 512 MB or less.

The rules that actually bite

1. Idle machines get taken away

Oracle reclaims Always Free compute it considers idle. The official definition — all three true over a 7-day window:

• 95th-percentile CPU utilization under 20%
• Network utilization under 20%
• Memory utilization under 20% (ARM shapes only)

A VM hosting a personal site with light traffic can absolutely sit below all three. Your options: actually use the machine (run n8n, Uptime Kuma, or a media server — real workloads easily clear 20% memory on 12 GB… actually no, they often don’t. Be honest about this), or upgrade to Pay As You Go — Always Free resources stay $0, but the reclaim policy no longer applies to you. The PAYG upgrade is the standard move for anyone serious.

2. Home region is forever

Always Free resources only exist in your home region, chosen at signup and permanently locked. For India: Mumbai and Hyderabad both exist, but Mumbai’s ARM capacity is chronically exhausted (“out of host capacity” errors for weeks on end). Hyderabad is usually the easier pick, and the latency difference within India is minor.

If you pick a region with no ARM capacity, your only options are retrying in a loop, a different availability domain, or upgrading to PAYG (paid accounts get priority capacity).

3. Signup rejections are common and unexplained

Oracle’s fraud filter rejects a lot of legitimate signups, support won’t tell you why, and there’s no appeal that works reliably. Stack the odds:

• Real name matching your card, real address
• No VPN, no privacy email domains
• A card that passes 3-D Secure (Indian cards: ensure international transactions are enabled — the ₹something verification hold is reversed)
• Don’t retry rapidly after a rejection — wait and use a different browser/network

4. The card is for identity only — with one asterisk

Always Free resources never charge. But if you later upgrade to PAYG for the reclaim exemption and capacity priority, then paid resources you create do bill. Keep budget alerts on from day one and create nothing that isn’t labeled Always Free-eligible unless you mean to pay.

Sensible ways to use 2 OCPU / 12 GB

Still a lot of machine. Realistic single-VM setups we’d actually run:

• The self-hosting starter stack: Docker + Uptime Kuma (~150 MB) + n8n (~450 MB) + Vaultwarden + a static site — barely 1.5 GB used, 10 GB to spare
• One heavy app: Immich (photo backup) or Jellyfin — the 12 GB matters here
• The always-on anchor for everything your laptop can’t do: cron jobs, webhooks, monitoring the rest of your infra

Pair with Cloudflare’s free tier (DNS + tunnel) and you have a production-grade setup at exactly ₹0/month.

Verdict

Still the best free compute deal in existence — just smaller than its reputation. Go in expecting 2 OCPU / 12 GB, pick Hyderabad over Mumbai, keep the machine genuinely busy or upgrade to PAYG, and treat every old tutorial’s resource numbers as fiction.

Track the current numbers on our Oracle Cloud data page — when Oracle changes this tier again, that page and our alert list update first.