What's actually free¶
The Oracle Cloud Always-Free tier is generous — genuinely one of the most generous perpetual free tiers among the major clouds — but the fine print matters. Here's what you get, what you don't, and what to watch for.
Compute¶
| Shape | Free allowance | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| VM.Standard.E2.1.Micro | 2 instances | AMD x86_64, 1/8 OCPU, 1 GB RAM. Older gen but rock-solid. |
| VM.Standard.A1.Flex | 4 OCPU total, 24 GB RAM total | Ampere ARM64. Split across 1-4 instances however you like. |
So you can run:
- 2 × AMD Micros + 1 × ARM Ampere with all 4 OCPU / 24 GB, or
- 2 × AMD Micros + 2 × ARM Ampere with 2 OCPU / 12 GB each, or
- Any combination that fits.
The AMD Micros are tiny — 1 GB RAM is fine for Caddy + a static site, tight for anything with a database. The ARM Ampere is the workhorse: 24 GB RAM and 4 modern ARM cores is more than enough for most home-lab needs.
This guide uses 2 Micros + 1 Ampere
We provision two AMD Micros and one Ampere A1 with the full 4 OCPU / 24 GB. The AMDs handle small landing pages and simple services; the Ampere runs anything meaningful (containers, LLM inference APIs, etc.).
Storage¶
- 200 GB total block volume storage (across all instances)
- 20 GB object storage (S3-compatible)
- 10 GB archive storage
Each VM comes with a boot volume; those count against the 200 GB. Ubuntu 24.04 minimal happily lives in 47 GB boot volumes, so you can give each VM 47 GB (47 × 3 = 141 GB) and still have ~60 GB spare for object storage data or expanding a volume later.
Bandwidth¶
- 10 TB/month egress, aggregated across all your services
That's a lot. For context: streaming HD video is roughly 3 GB/hour. 10 TB is enough to serve small landing pages to millions of visitors, or a demo API to tens of thousands of API calls per hour, continuously.
Ingress is free.
DNS¶
- 3 DNS zones with high query allowance
This guide uses Cloudflare for DNS instead of Oracle's DNS, because Cloudflare's free tier is simpler and better-integrated with the rest of the web. You could also use Oracle's DNS — the guide's pattern works either way. See DNS with Cloudflare.
Other Always-Free services worth knowing¶
- Autonomous Database (2 × 20 GB) — great if you need a managed SQL DB. This guide doesn't cover it.
- Notifications (1M SMS-equivalents/month for topics)
- Monitoring (500M ingest points/month)
- Vault (managed KMS + secrets — 20 requests/sec)
What is NOT free (common gotchas)¶
These bite people the first time:
| Trap | Why it's a trap |
|---|---|
| Load Balancer (regular) | 10 Mbps LB is free (1 of them). The 100 Mbps / 400 Mbps LBs are NOT free. If you accidentally create a "flexible" LB, you pay. This guide skips OCI's LB entirely — Caddy on the VMs does the job for free. |
| NAT Gateway | Not free. If your instances are in a private subnet and reach out to the internet via NAT, you pay per GB. This guide keeps instances on a public subnet with public IPs — no NAT needed. |
| Bare Metal shapes | Anything with "Bare Metal" in the name is billed. Stick to the two shapes listed above. |
| GPU shapes | All A10 / A100 / H100 shapes are paid. Don't touch. |
| Boot volumes beyond 200 GB total | The 200 GB is a hard aggregate limit. Attaching a 100 GB block volume to one instance leaves 100 GB across the others. |
| Extra reserved public IPs | Each instance gets 1 free ephemeral or reserved public IP. Extra reserved IPs beyond that are billed. |
| Cross-region traffic | Free tier is per home region. If you multi-region, egress between regions is billed. This guide is single-region. |
How to verify you're staying free¶
Two things to do right after signup:
- Set a budget alert. Even a "notify me if usage exceeds $1" alert is a fail-safe that fires long before anything meaningful is charged. See Staying always-free.
- Check the "Always Free" filter in every compute-shape picker. The OCI console has an explicit "Always Free-eligible" filter checkbox — use it every time you provision anything.
Regional availability of Always-Free¶
Every OCI region offers Always-Free, but the ARM Ampere shape is
capacity-constrained in most popular regions. If you're on US East
Coast, us-ashburn-1 and us-phoenix-1 are the usual choices — Ashburn
often has better ARM capacity but is more competitive for AMD; Phoenix is
the reverse. This guide is region-agnostic; pick whichever is closest to
where you or your users are.
Once you pick a region as your home region, you cannot change it. Choose deliberately.
Next¶
Head to Sign up and tenancy to create your Oracle Cloud account and set up the tenancy.