How long does "it's free" last?
In June 2026 Oracle Cloud halved its free tier with no announcement. Free is not a price, it's a contract term — and the two questions to ask when you get a quote.
On 15 June 2026, Oracle Cloud’s “Always Free” tier was cut in half. The ARM compute allowance went from 4 OCPU / 24GB to 2 OCPU / 12GB. There was no public announcement. The people who noticed were the ones who spotted the numbers change in the documentation, and the ones whose servers stopped.
Technically, a limit changed. As a business matter, it means slightly more than that.
Free is not a price, it’s a contract term
When someone says “this part is free”, we hear a price. What we actually receive is a condition the other party can change on their own. A price increase arrives as an invoice, so you notice. A shrinking free tier does not send an invoice. You find out when something stops working.
In this case, free-tier accounts running above the new limit reportedly had instances shut down until manually resized. Which looks like: something that worked yesterday stops, without anyone touching it.
So should you avoid free tiers?
I don’t think so. This site runs on Cloudflare’s free tier.
The test is not “is it cheap”. It is what breaks if this stops.
Things that can stop without hurting belong on a free tier. Test environments, internal convenience tools, articles like this one. A few hours of downtime inconveniences someone; it does not cost money.
Things whose downtime hits revenue or trust should not sit on a free tier. The contact form that brings you work, customer data, anything involved in billing. When those stop, the recovery time is the loss.
Drawing that line is a business question, not a technical one. Which is why I think the owner should draw it, not the engineer.
Two questions to ask about any quote
When you commission work externally, or receive a proposal internally, ask these two. No technical knowledge required.
1. Which parts of this run on a free tier?
“We kept it cheap” means different things depending on whether it came from a discount or from a free allowance. The future risk is not the same.
2. If the free tier went away, what would this cost per month?
If no number comes back, the thinking is not finished yet. If you can afford that number, using the free tier is the right call. If you cannot, what you have is a design that depends on the free tier, and one day it gets rebuilt.
How I decided
When I set this site up, I recorded the hosting choice as a decision record. “Can it be used commercially on the free tier” was the first filter — but I also worked out what it would cost if the free tier vanished. The answer landed inside what I could pay. So I used the free tier.
Free is borrowed. Borrow it assuming the day comes when they ask for it back, and that day is uneventful.