Oracle Free Tier being reduced....

Comments

• gremeyer Member

  July 6

  @jorohe6515 said:
  Yes, you are (all) right, there is many contradicting information currently on OCI and within the docs. If you check Reddit, you can find out that there is even more confusion if you contact Oracle support, because different people there will tell you even more different things.

  What we know so far for sure:

  • Oracle is reducing their limits
  • They announced to existing customers that you should stay within the new limits
  • There is now a difference between Free Tier and PAYG.
    • The first has now a maximum limit of 2OCPU/12G on the ARM flex instances. It is not possible anymore on FreeTier to go beyond that limit. Before the change, the limit was defined by 3,000 OCPU hours, so it was possible to run a instance with up to 80cores for a short time. Not possible any more.
    • For PAYG there is no OCPU limit (amount of cores), but your free amount will be reduced from 3,000 to 1,500 OCPU hours.

  What we don't know:

  • Is there a grace period for users not downsizing their VPS now?
    • Meaning for Free-Tier: will your VPS be shutdown this month or not
    • For PAYG: Do you already have to pay after the 15th this month or not

  Just because I have seen Oracle in the past deleting "always free" instances (now called "always free eligable") for no reason, my opinion is: better be careful.

  I'm guessing they're still implementing the change in all the places that mention it. I was going to downsize my instance, but I'll wait until it's clearer. People are saying they haven't been able to launch new ARM instances due to capacity issues, which doesn't inspire much confidence.
• TimboJones Member

  July 6

  @gremeyer said:

  @jorohe6515 said:
  Yes, you are (all) right, there is many contradicting information currently on OCI and within the docs. If you check Reddit, you can find out that there is even more confusion if you contact Oracle support, because different people there will tell you even more different things.

  What we know so far for sure:

  • Oracle is reducing their limits
  • They announced to existing customers that you should stay within the new limits
  • There is now a difference between Free Tier and PAYG.
    • The first has now a maximum limit of 2OCPU/12G on the ARM flex instances. It is not possible anymore on FreeTier to go beyond that limit. Before the change, the limit was defined by 3,000 OCPU hours, so it was possible to run a instance with up to 80cores for a short time. Not possible any more.
    • For PAYG there is no OCPU limit (amount of cores), but your free amount will be reduced from 3,000 to 1,500 OCPU hours.

  What we don't know:

  • Is there a grace period for users not downsizing their VPS now?
    • Meaning for Free-Tier: will your VPS be shutdown this month or not
    • For PAYG: Do you already have to pay after the 15th this month or not

  Just because I have seen Oracle in the past deleting "always free" instances (now called "always free eligable") for no reason, my opinion is: better be careful.

  I'm guessing they're still implementing the change in all the places that mention it. I was going to downsize my instance, but I'll wait until it's clearer. People are saying they haven't been able to launch new ARM instances due to capacity issues, which doesn't inspire much confidence.

  Don't delete the vm, just resize the shape.

  Thanked by 1gremeyer
• ralf Member

  July 7

  @jorohe6515 said:

  @gremeyer said:
  Did they ever say anything about existing instances being affected? Or is it just new deployments?

  Yes, free tier is going to be reduced. If you log in, you will see a banner. If you don't downsize, they will shut down your VPS. PAYG is probably going to be charged then for half of the month.

  I haven't been informed by e-mail of any changes, and I haven't logged into the management thingy since last January 2025. Both my instances seem to be happily chugging along doing nothing except artificially keeping the load at 50% (following the advice a few years back about them deleting free instances with less than 10% load).
• TimboJones Member

  July 7

  @ralf said:

  @jorohe6515 said:

  @gremeyer said:
  Did they ever say anything about existing instances being affected? Or is it just new deployments?

  Yes, free tier is going to be reduced. If you log in, you will see a banner. If you don't downsize, they will shut down your VPS. PAYG is probably going to be charged then for half of the month.

  I haven't been informed by e-mail of any changes, and I haven't logged into the management thingy since last January 2025. Both my instances seem to be happily chugging along doing nothing except artificially keeping the load at 50% (following the advice a few years back about them deleting free instances with less than 10% load).

  I never got anymore warnings and they probably do even less now. I suspect that backfired on them.
• gremeyer Member

  July 7

  @ralf said:

  @jorohe6515 said:

  @gremeyer said:
  Did they ever say anything about existing instances being affected? Or is it just new deployments?

  Yes, free tier is going to be reduced. If you log in, you will see a banner. If you don't downsize, they will shut down your VPS. PAYG is probably going to be charged then for half of the month.

  I haven't been informed by e-mail of any changes, and I haven't logged into the management thingy since last January 2025. Both my instances seem to be happily chugging along doing nothing except artificially keeping the load at 50% (following the advice a few years back about them deleting free instances with less than 10% load).

  The only thing I've been running on mine for the past few years is a Minecraft server, which is known to use a ton of RAM. I never ran a program to use the CPU 24/7, that might have been the reason it stayed up for that long, but they never terminated my instance.