Yep. It's NOT possible to sign up OCI without a payment method now. I signed up late last month and observed the same.

Additionally, it's next to impossible to spin up a free instance even if you provision it under the limit. Every single availability zone in the U.S. have all been constantly "emitting out of capacity" errors for free tier resource allocation. Ironically, if you provisioning beyond the free tier, they are ALL success.

So it looks like Oracle shawdow banned the free tier (or only allow a fixed set of free tier resources that are completely saturated all the time (unless someone spin down their free tier instances).

> You may see a small, temporary charge on your payment method.

A small, temporary $100 charge, lol. Gave me a little shock when I signed up as a student.

Need to sell your info to data brokers

Trick is to make a bit larger instance, then scale it down to the always free limits - or so I've heard. You might pay a small amount, but totally worth it. That Arm server with 4 oCPU, 24GB, 200GB SSD is a beast, I've had it since 2022.

Btw make sure you crank up the SSD speed all the way, as long as it is in the always free limit, you won't be charged for it ... Even though it says you will.

Yes, it definitely worked. I had three servers with them for years and only added a card this year because it lifted bandwidth limits on the ARM.

I did not try for long, but I was also never able to actually provision, this was a couple years ago when I tried, the only people I saw report success were using the scripted methodology to periodically attempt I mentioned in grandparent comment.

It has for me. I've had several permanent Arm-VPSes running in OCI for almost 4 years, without paying a single cent. But I'm on a paid tenancy, by having provided a verified payment card, which I think is the distinction that the OP is trying to describe.

A "free tenancy" has limitations: e.g. your provisioned Free(tm) resources can suddenly be yoinked in order to satisfy an allocation from a user who's in a paid tenancy, even if that allocation also fits inside their Free(tm) envelope and ends up costing $0.00/mo. Simply put, the "paying" customers have dibs, even on free stuff.

I'm a PAYG subscriber and the notice on my account says

"Always Free Ampere A1 Compute entitlements have changed. This update does not affect your paid resources, existing paid workloads or bill. Contact support for further questions."

They state that here and it's been stated there in the several years I've run Always Free VM's there: https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/FreeTier/freetier...

Some people say that doesn't apply to PAYG users, I do not know about that for sure, I am a PAYG user since 2021 and have not experienced any reclamation issues.

I wrote a script to simulate a variable workload when the load averages dipped so that I could keep my mostly-idle VMs running. It felt like a waste of energy but the VMs are in short supply which meant that Oracle has already decided that their servers will generate heat regardless of my actions: if I wasn't burning enough CPU cycles they would find someone who would.

Load average of ~30% per core seems to have been enough to repel the elephants.

I use mine as a reverse proxy for accessing my home plex via tailscale and a few other small purposes. Noticed they would turn it off at random too. Setup a script to SSH into it every 5 minutes and that stopped it - it's been up for a couple years now.