I have seen this free Oracle tier mentioned a few times and their signup form always scared me off, but I finally verified it’s accurate this morning. Oracle’s Always Free tier gets you 2 cores, 12 GB of RAM, and 10 TB of monthly bandwidth for $0. Forever, not a 30-day trial. The closest DigitalOcean droplet is $84/month.

What’s crazier: this was twice the size until a few months ago. Oracle gave 24 GB of RAM until June 15, 2026, when they halved it to 2/12 with no announcement, no email, and no changelog entry. They edited the docs page in place. On August 18 they started terminating instances that were over the new cap. (ok, that’s scary)

Four things before you start:

  • I only tested this in the US. No idea how the signup behaves elsewhere.
  • Sign up on a desktop browser. The form misbehaves badly on mobile. You must enter a credit card for verification, but it’s still free.
  • The signup process is clunky and confusing, and their admin console is the most complicated I’ve used, more confusing than Azure. Push through it. You only need to find your profile page once to add your SSH key.
  • Keep the account “Active.” People report accounts getting shut down, and it’s not clear to me what triggers it. Log in occasionally and actually use the server.

Step 1: Sign Up

Go to oracle.com/cloud/free on a desktop browser. The account stays at $0 unless you deliberately upgrade to a paid tier.

Step 2: Wait for Provisioning

Mine took about 30 minutes to go from “submitted” to the fully-provisioned email. Identity and API access come online before compute does, so don’t panic if the console works but instance creation doesn’t yet.

Step 3: Add Your SSH Key

Find your profile page in the console and upload your SSH public key. This is the one piece of the admin UI you have to locate. Everything else you can ignore.

Step 4: Create the Instance

Compute, then Instances, then Create instance. Pick Ubuntu 24.04 (the ARM build) and the VM.Standard.A1.Flex shape set to 2 OCPU / 12 GB RAM. Bump the boot volume to 100 GB, since the default 47 GB is stingy and the storage is free. The login user is ubuntu.

If it says “out of host capacity,” switch availability domains. Free ARM capacity is scarce. In us-ashburn-1, AD-1 and AD-2 both refused me and AD-3 worked on the first try.

What to do next

  • Install Tailscale first. curl -fsSL https://tailscale.com/install.sh | sh, then sudo tailscale up --ssh, then close port 22 in the Oracle security list. A free box with an open SSH port is a free box for someone else.
  • Run a token factory orchestrator on it. This is the right size for the always-on box that schedules agent runs, holds the queue and cron jobs, calls model APIs, and keeps state between runs. That work waits on network I/O, so 2 cores goes a long way. Inference happens on someone else’s GPUs.
  • Other good fits: Postgres, webhook receivers, scrapers, personal automations, a Tailscale exit node.
  • Ignore any guide that says 4 cores / 24 GB. Most tutorials and most AI assistants still quote the pre-June allowance.
  • Don’t worry much about idle reclamation. Oracle only reclaims an instance when CPU, network, and memory all sit under 20% for a full week at once. Real usage clears that bar.