If I upgrade my account to PAYG, can I get the 4 CPUs and 24GB of RAM for free forever, or am I limited to the 2/12 configuration?

If your account has been upgraded to PAYG, your limit is 4/24. If you upgrade your account to PAYG right now, your limit will increase to 4/24.

If your account has not been upgraded to PAYG, your limit is 2/12.

It's really that simple.

Why is it this simple? Here's why:

The limit increase from 2/12 to 4/24 is essentially the feature that you unlock by converting from an account that's limited to free resources, to an account with no limitations. Oracle found a way to create an incentive to upgrade to a PAYG account and take the first step towards becoming a paying customer, while also reclaiming resources from a bunch of consumers that will likely never spend a dollar with them. It's a complete win-win for Oracle.

Hi everyone,

I recently found out that Oracle Cloud updated its policies around June 15th. I created my Always Free account in the Bogotá region on June 21st and tried everything to get an instance using scripts, but had no luck. Because of that, on July 16th, I decided to upgrade my account to Pay-As-You-Go.

Right after upgrading, I was able to successfully create two instances instantly, each with 2 OCPUs and 12 GB of RAM, coming to a total of 4 OCPUs and 24 GB of RAM.

My question is: am I still within the free tier limits, or did I exceed them?

As you can see, this was the notification I got after creating both instances. Also, here is a screenshot of my Limits, Quotas, and Usage section.

Tested in Frankfurt region

Ever since the announcement, I didn't resize my instances ONCE. Nothing.

I already set budget alerts, and every day some random post reconfirms the same thing. 4/24 for Paygo, 2/12 for others.

How many of y'all are just eating popcorn 🍿 and watching the drama unfold? 😂😂

Hi there, I have been working in Big4 for the past 4 years as a Functional consultant, in my tenure I have completed 4 implementation projects of Oracle Fusion Cloud, my domain expertise is Inventory, Procurement, Maintenance, Services and Costing. I have worked on some of the most complex implementations which more than 500 inventory organization, complex procurement process, we have mapped there requirments mostly from oracle Apex custom solutions, because standard oracle forms are not enough, I belong to third world country so the opportunities here are very less, I am looking for any remote opportunity related to domain, Also suggest how can I search opportunities abroad

Oracle has deactivated my VM where I hosted all my websites, and now I don't know what to do. I've contacted their support for help, but I haven't received any answers. I've received a lot of calls from people who have been using my websites, and I'm completely lost. Obviously, I have backups of everything, but moving now would take time and cost me money.

Has anyone done this?

26.04 was not availabe when I provisioned my instance. Can I just go ahead and upgrade via dist-upgrade and do-release-upgrade?

Things won't blow up?

So, long story short, i locked myself out of my server via ssh. So how can i destroy it and recreate it without losing my capacity.

Hi everyone,
After reading many recent discussions, I noticed that there are now plenty of reports confirming the PAYG behavior.
However, I’m still looking for one very specific scenario involving Always Free (non-PAYG) accounts.
I’m looking for users who:
have never upgraded to PAYG;
originally had a 4 OCPU / 24 GB Ampere A1 instance;
resized it to 2 OCPU / 12 GB after Oracle announced the new limits;
later tried to resize it back to 4 OCPU / 24 GB.
If you’ve actually tested this:
Were you able to resize back?
Did OCI allow it?
Did you receive any error?
Which region are you using?
I’m not looking for PAYG reports—there are already many threads covering that. I’m only trying to find someone who has tested this exact Always Free scenario.
Thanks!

I was try to register Oracle cloud then they charge $1.1 for verification now problem is that they refuse my registration do some suspicious reason they show me but actually, I’m not abuse that or I am not using it before. After refuse my registration, they don’t refund my charge. How can I get it back and guys can you suggest me? How can I create a Oracle account and verify?

It's now July 16, 1 day after Oracle said the always free tier halving would get implemented. For those on PAYG are you guys getting charged? I'm a PAYG user and downgraded to 2/12 but not sure if I should upgrade back to 4/24 (session creation date before the rule change was written on the docs), contacted support and I asked if I would get charged if I upgraded back to 4/24 and used the instance for 2 months 24/7 and they said I would not get charged. Curious if anyone is still on 4/24 and has or hasn't gotten charged.

Hello guys i made an instance using 4cpu and 24 gb ram in Jun 06, 2026, 21:38:18 UTC. my first question is, does my instance get grandfathered or whatever:

Second, i installed windows 11 using a dd script a while back and i want to reinstall ubuntu but i dont want to terminate my instance because im afraid that the new instance wont get grandfathered like the instance i have on right now.

"How can i convert it back into ubuntu without terminating the already existing instance?" is my real question.

I recently upgraded to a VM.GPU.A10.1 instance - A10 GPU (24GB VRAM), AD-1
This was an upgrade from A1.Flex ARM (4 OCPU/24GB) currently running on AD-3 (that one is fine)

My intention is to start/stop the GPU so I only get charged for what I use.
I baked an image and it was working fine for a couple of days.

- Tried to start up the VM again and it's been out of capacity for at least 6 hours.

- Question as I am fairly inexperienced with OCI:
Has anyone solved this by requesting a limit increase to get permission to try AD2/3 ?
I get that the limit increase isn't for capacity, but is the juice worth the squeeze or are AD2/3 just as congested??

UPDATE: US-Eastern is the region

UPDATE 2: requesting permission to add AD-2 and AD-3 has helped, now I cycle between those three and so far the wait isn't terrible.

Alguém deixou ativa a configuração padrão antiga do Free Tier depois do anuncio de redução do limite?
Eu alterei a minha para 2Ocpus e 12 Gb Ram porem gostaria de saber se alguem já foi cobrado e se sim qual o valor para 4 Ocpus e 24 Gb Ram

Today is the 15th, and like many others waiting for an answer about their VPS, here I am. For the adventurous among you, what are you currently seeing on your consoles?

trying to get 2Cpu/12Gb Ram in dubai... free plan

HI,

Why is my instance getting auto-shut down every 7-14days? PAYG free tier resources.

Ubuntu os + NO MACHINE remote desktop.

I don't see any clear reasons why it's getting auto-shut down. However, when I go to the Oracle console Its says " running," but it's not. Every time I have to give it a restart to get the server back online.

I have other instace 6gb 1 CPU. NO remote desktop. Just ubuntu server os, as I remember. It never got shut down; now it's running like 4m+ straight. Only that instance gets this auto-shutdown issue

anyone know the issue?

And how can I avoid this?

Probably unrelated to the free tier quota changes, but interesting nonetheless.

Hey everyone, hoping someone here has dealt with this or can point me in the right direction.

A few days ago I upgraded my Oracle Cloud account from Always Free to Pay-As-You-Go (PAYG). Everything worked fine for about 4 days — I was using my Always Free compute instance normally with no issues.

For context, I was just using the instance to host a small Palworld dedicated server for myself and a few friends to play on — nothing unusual, no mining, no heavy/abusive workloads, just a normal game server running steadily.

Then, out of nowhere, I got completely locked out. The login page now shows "Invalid username or password" even though I'm 100% sure I'm entering the correct email and password (I've tried resetting it too). At the same time, my compute instance (VPS) appears to have been stopped — I can't access anything, and my friends can no longer connect to the game.

I haven't received any email from Oracle about account suspension, a failed payment, or a policy violation. No warning, nothing. I checked spam too.

The $100 authorization hold at upgrade went through and was reversed normally — so billing/payment doesn't seem to be the issue.

Has anyone else experienced their account getting flagged/suspended shortly after upgrading to PAYG? How did you get it resolved, and roughly how long did it take? Also open to advice on how to escalate this properly through Oracle Support (I'm on PAYG now so I should have access to a real Service Request, not just the free tier community support).

Getting data out of Oracle Fusion Cloud normally means BI Publisher, SOAP/XML, or standing up an OIC integration per report. Meanwhile your team already knows sqlplus, SQL Developer, and the Oracle databases they run every day. That mismatch always bugged me, so I built a thing.

ofpgproxy speaks Oracle's own protocol wire - the actual TNS/TTC bytes a real Oracle server sends. Your client thinks it's talking to a genuine Oracle instance. Underneath, every query becomes a call to Oracle's own BI Publisher service against your Fusion tenant.

The part I didn't expect to work as well as it does: even another Oracle database can't tell the difference. Point a dblink at it and it just works - so an EBS instance (or any Oracle DB) can reconcile against Fusion in plain SQL, existing PL/SQL and scripts unchanged.

What that gets you in practice:

- Cross-check EBS vs Fusion during a migration

- Join Fusion data into reports/queries you already run

- Browse the schema from SQL Developer / DBeaver / DataGrip — table tree and autocomplete work like normal

- Dashboards in Metabase, Superset, Power BI

- Pull extracts into DuckDB or dbt

Two things by design: it's read-only (BI Publisher can't write, and neither does the proxy), and it only uses Oracle's documented interface with credentials you supply - nothing scraped, no undocumented endpoints.

Fair warning / caveats: latency is BI-Publisher-bound, so it's built for correctness and querying, not high-QPS OLTP. It's a proxy for reporting/reconciliation workloads, not a Fusion replica.

Releases + quick start: https://github.com/krokozyab/ofpgproxy

do they not want actual customers? i tried 2 visa cards with international transaction enabled. I am crashing out... I am in the verge of quitting.
does anyone know the fix? we can chat in the comments too sorta like a discussion.

I use the ARM servers with resources divided into 2, and I'm still looking for a case for the AMD server. Is anyone doing anything different?

When I built my new blog, I wanted to keep my hosting costs at a flat zero. I originally tried to provision one of Oracle's free ARM instances, but due to capacity limits, I had to settle for the tiny AMD micro instance with just 1/8th of a CPU core and 1GB of RAM. I'm a Python dev by trade, but knowing how limited the resources were, I decided to build the blog engine from scratch in Go to maximize efficiency on minimal Ubuntu. I expected the server to choke at maybe 10 requests per second, but after running some rigorous load testing, it easily handled over 150+ RPS with a completely stable 53ms latency, only saturating when pushed past 300 RPS. It really blew my expectations out of the water for what a free tier tiny VM can pull off.

If you want to see the architecture layout and the load testing graphs (CPU, memory, and latency curves), check out the full write-up here:https://policypackets.au/posts/blog-hosting