I tried getting some free ARM oracle servers a couple months back. I ended up setting up a whole PAYG setup, eventually got tired of trying to get their cloud to actually provision me any of these supposed free ARM systems, and have been a customer for a couple months now paying ~80/mo for the couple VPS's I've been playing with.
Speaking as an Oracle customer, let me heartily disrecommend them to everyone. Terrible experience.
Their reputation is what keeps me away from anything free of theirs.
Thanks for saving me some time. I wanted a free little server in case my home RPi is down for whatever reason. Not surprised it's too good to be true.
I've been on the free tier 1vCPU x86 / 1GB RAM for years and it was a perfect experience. I recently upgraded to the 4/24, and indeed you need to change to PAYG or otherwise it's out of capacity, but still no problem and within the free limits. For your use case, if the 1/1 instance is enough, I highly recommend Oracle and it's not something I imagined myself saying.
Thanks, that might still be useful for me. I did want more RAM to make it equivalent to my 4GB RPi, but 1GB is enough to at least act as a relay server.
You might find this guide helpful: https://guides.viren070.me/selfhosting/oracle