Oracle Cloud's always-free tier includes 2 AMD E4.Flex micro VMs, 4 ARM Ampere A1 cores (up to 24GB RAM), 200GB total block storage, 10GB object storage, and 10TB monthly outbound transfer — permanently, with no 12-month expiry.
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure's always-free tier is genuinely one of the most generous permanent free cloud offerings in the industry. Unlike AWS's "always free" tier (which covers limited Lambda requests and minimal DynamoDB) or GCP's "always free" resources (which are quite minimal for compute), Oracle's always-free tier includes meaningful compute resources that you can run real workloads on indefinitely.
The compute resources include two AMD-based VM.Standard.E4.Flex micro instances with 1/8th of an OCPU and 1GB RAM each — useful for lightweight services, monitoring agents, or simple web servers. More importantly, Oracle provides 4 ARM-based Ampere A1 cores with 24GB RAM total that can be distributed flexibly across up to 4 instances. A single A1 Flex instance with all 4 cores and 24GB RAM is a genuinely capable server that can run production-grade web applications, databases, or API services at no cost.
Storage always-free limits include 200GB total block volume storage (distributed across up to 5 volumes), 10GB of Oracle Cloud Object Storage, 5GB of Archive Storage, and 10GB of file storage through the NSF-based managed file service. For networking, the always-free tier covers 10TB of outbound data transfer per month — enough for a moderately trafficked website — and two load balancer instances (flexible shape, up to 10Mbps).
Database always-free resources include two Autonomous Databases (Autonomous Transaction Processing or Autonomous Data Warehouse) each with 1 OCPU and 20GB storage. These are fully managed databases — Oracle handles patching, backup, and scaling automatically. For many small applications, these free managed databases replace the need for a separate database server.
The always-free resources never expire and do not require a credit card after initial account registration (though Oracle does require one at signup). The practical limitation is that Oracle's fraud detection can sometimes suspend new free accounts, and getting the A1 ARM instances provisioned can have availability constraints in some regions. Our pre-activated Oracle accounts at $40–$130 bypass the registration friction and come ready to use. If you need to run persistent workloads on Oracle's exceptional free tier, a pre-activated account is the fastest path to the free resources.
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