Recently wanted to make a new free instance at the lowest settings, but my zone is completely overbooked. Oracle does not let you move your free instance to a new zone.
According to what I read, the only way to spin up a new free instance is run a script elsewhere to attempt instance creation every minute using the API; and that takes an average of a couple weeks to bring something up.
With the RAM and storage costs being out of control it's odd it didn't happen long before now.
On top of that I wonder what running any kind of free service looks like when there are so many AI agents out there that could use and abuse them. Many forms of abuse that were more difficult to automate in the past can likely be monitored and restarted with an agentic loop now.