Oracle free tier changing, be careful? (Confirmed)

AnthonySmith

There are rumblings on Reddit that the free tier has been and is being limited to less than half the allowance.

Also that it's a soft limit so AWS in crack style you start getting billed for overages.

https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/FreeTier/freetier_topic-Always_Free_Resources.htm

Documentation has been updated and a few chat screen it's on Reddit show that the terms and calculator will follow.

So just a heads up, oracle are not known for playing nice, this could be nothing but just in case, manage your usage or you could end up with a nasty bill.

Thought I would post this so it can be updated as we go.

Could still be nothing.

Edit: now confirmed

You will start being billed from the 15th if you are over the NEW free tier ... enjoy your 4 days notice.

havoc

Well spotted. Yeah definitely changed. Used to be 4 ARM cores, 2 x64.

The reclaim of idle is also new...I had stuff idling there for years

Oracle is in big trouble financially so they're probably cutting anything they can

AnthonySmith

I think the worst part is that they seem to be planning to leave it to you to downgrade or they will just start charging you.

If I recall, you have to keep a payment method on file to have the free tier.

TemporiousOne

Just getting a free tier compute instance was a massive pain as it always had no availability. Only way to get one was to write looping scripts that hammer the API until one was available.

The idle reclaim has been around for a while now. There are many scripts out there to create a 20% CPU load so that your instance is not flagged as idle. Horribly un-green.

I had to register a credit card to just create an account. Even the credit card registration is a massive pain. The CC details entered need to match exactly to what is on the card and in the exact same sequence. Keying in "10 Penny Rd" instead of "10 Penny Road" will cause failure. Absolutely no indication off what went wrong will be had from the UI or Oracle support.

tetech

This doesn't smell right... Oracle offer two types of account, an "Always Free" account and a "Pay as you go" account. Both get the free tier allowance, but the T&C are different. The whole point of the always free account is that you can't get any of the non-free services (if you try, it tells you that you need a PAYG account). The credit card is for abuse/verification rather than billing. I don't believe they will arbitrarily start charging people on "always free" accounts contrary to the T&C.

somik

I had a oracle free account that got terminated after 2 months of use. After that I was never able to sign up again.

I never trust "free" things from large corpos ever since google's "free" email with your own domain was discontinued...

havoc

@tetech said:
This doesn't smell right... Oracle offer two types of account, an "Always Free" account and a "Pay as you go" account. Both get the free tier allowance, but the T&C are different. The whole point of the always free account is that you can't get any of the non-free services (if you try, it tells you that you need a PAYG account). The credit card is for abuse/verification rather than billing. I don't believe they will arbitrarily start charging people on "always free" accounts contrary to the T&C.

I had understood the "Always free" resources to be a category that applies to both

Honest...this is oracle though I can totally imagine them doing a rug pull on paid accounts

AnthonySmith

@tetech said:
This doesn't smell right... Oracle offer two types of account, an "Always Free" account and a "Pay as you go" account. Both get the free tier allowance, but the T&C are different. The whole point of the always free account is that you can't get any of the non-free services (if you try, it tells you that you need a PAYG account). The credit card is for abuse/verification rather than billing. I don't believe they will arbitrarily start charging people on "always free" accounts contrary to the T&C.

You are right to be sceptical, the messaging is as clear as mud, but oracle is a confusing mess hidden behind clever terms so at this stage this is all a "be careful" thing I think.