r/oraclecloud

Reading through all these threads, and I’m honestly a bit shocked. Guys, let me break this down for you in simple terms so the folks at Oracle can stop laughing at us and get back to work.

For accounts that haven't verified a credit card (i.e., haven't shown the system $100), Oracle has introduced hard quotas of 2 cores and 12 GB of RAM. These accounts are technically blocked from taking any more than that—this is a crucial detail. They received a notification explicitly telling them to bring their instance parameters in line with these new quotas.

Every other account that has the technical capability to provision more than 2/12 gets the first 4 OCPUs and 24 GB of RAM completely free. It says so in the documentation, very clearly and explicitly. To prevent people from panicking, Oracle even pushed a notification to the dashboard stating there would be no changes to billing.

First, you guys scared each other, then you managed to scare the AIs, which are now hallucinating and spewing total nonsense. Meanwhile, the actual situation is as simple as it gets.

There is a lot of confusion surrounding this change at Oracle, so I looked for answers by reading between the lines.

I am currently running my VPS with maxed-out settings but restricted to just 12 hours of operation per day—theoretically keeping me within all limits by the end of the month.

However, while looking for a way to check my VPS usage time yesterday, I remembered the Cost and Usage Reports tab. I downloaded the daily reports and was able to see the data using a simple extraction and cleanup script.

Last month, the `oci_OverageFlag` was set to 'N', but currently, it is set to 'Y'.

To me, this feels like more than just a warning. I am curious to see how things play out after the 15th for the brave souls out there.

So, how are your logs looking? 👀

Hello, I just changed my oracle cloud account to PAYG to make an A1 instance, and while I was looking up some stuff, I found out about the new free tier limits (2 ocpu/12 ram, half the cpu time, etc), and does this affect me as well? 'Cause I can't seem to find any straight up info about this and I don't want to be charged

I have been PAYG customer since 12th June. I created the my free tier A1 instance (4 OCPU/24 GB) in May 2026.

I have been under the impression that older accounts won't get charged for their existing free tier ARM based instance.

Funny thing is that I got charged for only two days. Cost Analysis shows no upcoming costs.

What is actually going on?

Invoice

Cost Analysis Dashboard

Customer support update

Subscription page

June timeframe

Updated info:
- Some reason I got charged for the end of the month
- My budget alert got triggered after cost went above $1
- I'm quite grateful to Oracle for the massive free tier but expect some clarification to not get blindsided by the bills.
- I may be grandfathered according to them, not my words :)

Can anyone tell me how to fix the "Out of Capacity" error? Please, I’m really frustrated; I managed to create an Oracle account with great difficulty, but I don't have enough funds on my debit card to upgrade to the "Pay As You Go" plan. Could you tell me the best time to try for the Asia/Singapore time zone, or should I just wait a few days? I'm also unable to create an "Always Free" AMD server—it's showing the "Out of Capacity" error for that too. Please help. Edit: Can I Use Automatic Script In Oracle Account Is It Safe For Account?

I tried creating an Oracle Cloud Free Tier account using my HDFC credit card (India).

• Card verification charge was deducted twice.
• Account creation failed with the generic error: "Oops, we're sorry, an error occurred while creating your account."
• No Oracle account was created.

My questions:

1. How long does Oracle usually take to reverse these verification charges to an HDFC account?
2. Has anyone from India faced this issue and successfully resolved it?
3. Any idea what causes this error and how to get the account approved?

Thanks!

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I have a VM.Standard.A1.Flex 4/24 that I cannot SSH via PuTTY (time out) or even use a remote desktop (NoMachine) due to high disk usage. I can only connect via OCI Cloud Shell, is there a way to wipe sda disk clean and re install ubuntu minimal without terminating and creating a new instance? (really don`t want to loose the instance because of the recent changes)

Everybody posting random conversations with support. Seems most are about PAYG accounts.

What's the latest on people with free accounts? On some date they're going to be terminate? Just will keep running until termination and then downsized to 2 cpu?

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I've been reading quite a few threads over the last couple of days about Oracle's changes to Always Free and Pay As You Go (PAYG) accounts/instances, but I'm still a bit confused. I'm hoping someone can point me in the right direction.

I've used Oracle Cloud at work before, and now that I'm getting into homelabbing, I'm considering hosting some of my own projects there.

One project in particular is a lightweight Python web application that converts social media cooking recipes into a digital cookbook. It uses a "bring your own AI API key" approach. I originally built it because the existing solutions were simply too expensive for me.

The application would only be used by me and a few other people (max.5), so the expected traffic is very low. From what I can tell, it should easily fit within the Always Free resources.

I'm comfortable with Linux server administration, security hardening, and general infrastructure. My main concern is pricing and billing.

After reading these different posts, I'm unsure what the recommended approach is today (from not having an account yet):

* Should I create an Always Free account or go straight to a PAYG account?

* If I choose PAYG, can I simply stay within the Always Free resource limits and avoid charges?

* Is there any downside to choosing PAYG over an Always Free account if my goal is to stay within the free limits?

* I don't have any experience with Oracle's ARM instances yet. Would you recommend them for a small Python web application, or should I stick with x86?

I'd really appreciate any recommendations or experiences from the community.

Thanks in advance!

Edit: sorry if there is already a thread like this

Edit 2: Thank you everybody for your responses, you really helped me out :)

I've been running my app's backend (Node.js + MongoDB) on an Oracle Always Free Ampere A1 instance (4 OCPU/24GB) for months. It got automatically terminated by Oracle's idle-reclamation policy after a quiet week of low traffic.

No big deal, I thought — I still had my boot volume (47GB, fully intact), so I just needed to spin up a new instance from it.

Except when I tried, I hit LimitExceeded errors. Turns out my tenancy's free-tier quota had been silently cut to 2 OCPU/12GB — half of what I had before — following Oracle's June 2026 policy change to the Always Free tier.

Then even at the reduced 2/12 spec, I hit "Out of host capacity" — Mumbai region simply has no free ARM hosts available right now.

So in one evening: my working production server was gone, my quota was cut in half without warning, and even the reduced allocation couldn't be provisioned due to capacity. All while trying to launch a feature I'd been building for weeks.

Data's safe (boot volume survived), but the whole experience was rough — especially not knowing this quota change had even happened until I hit the wall trying to recover.

Anyone else run into this? Considering PAYG or just moving to a paid VPS at this point.

Auto CC payments doesn't work in India so payments always fail and then I manually pay in customer center.

This time it got declined but invoice is not appearing under 'payment due'.

Should I be worried ? It is a frustrating experience .

Edit: Showed up in oracle customer panel after a day, So it can take a while.

I have a Free Tier account I made over 3 years ago with a 4/24 instance I made around the same time. All this time it has been working fine. It's not a trial account, it's not a PAYG account. I am well within the green zone on usage and it's not idle.

I just now discovered here on Reddit that they're slashing the Always Free resources in half. I checked my dashboard and I don't have any banners about that, but my limits page does have the new numbers, and funnily says that I'm in the negatives right now on them - like -12GB and -2 cores. Way to go, Oracle, to not notify anyone about it lol. It was buried in a big list of random metrics in the Governance section.

The instance is still active and works, though.

I don't want to do anything rash so I don't lose the instance, i.e. I should definitely not terminate it. So I'm very reluctant to resize it.

What's my course of action here? Keep it and pray it doesn't get term'd? Or is it safe to resize it without losing my allocated capacity? I have 0 Oracle support, as far as I'm concerned there are no human employees at that company, only a really cheap AI model, so the only other way is to ask Reddit.

Thought it would be useful to share here, I documented how I backed up my free tier instance. Paranoia and all

Hi everyone,

I'd like to use Oracle Cloud Free Tier, but I don't have a credit card. I also don't have a debit card that Oracle accepts for verification.

Is there any legitimate way to create an Oracle Cloud Free Tier account without using a credit card?

If not, are there any alternatives for students or developers who don't own a credit card yet?

I'd appreciate any advice or suggestions. Thanks!

Congratulations to those who got the grandfathered before the new policy. Let’s stop asking.

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