The always free was recently cut to 12 GB RAM and 2 cores per month.

https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/FreeTier/freetier...

Interesting. I just signed into my machine and checked

    ubuntu@instance-20250824-2334:~$ free -mh
                   total        used        free      shared  buff/cach  available
    Mem:            23Gi       3.5Gi       768Mi       7.7Gi        19Gi        11Gi
    Swap:             0B          0B          0B
I must be grandfathered in to the old one. Also I really need to add a swapfile lol.

I bet if you restart it it'll apply the new limits

This has been communicated heavily. They will kill your instance one day soon.

Yeah, I am fine with that. What I have on there is pretty low-stakes and everything I care about on there is backed up regularly with Restic to my local server. If they decide to do murder it, that will suck, I will be annoyed for like twenty minutes, and then I shall move on. It’s not like I paid for it.

Always free, with 12GB and 2 cores? What's the catch?

As far as I can tell, there really isn't one. I haven't paid Oracle any money since I started and the machine appears to work fine. I think they treat these things as loss-leaders in hopes that you bother your employer to get the more expensive non-free plans.

Sweet. I will have to take a look at.