Oracle Always Free in 2026: the June cut, and what AWS, Azure, and GCP charge for the same box

Always Free Ampere A1 dropped from 4 OCPU / 24 GB to 2 OCPU / 12 GB on 15 June 2026. Here is what is left, and what the nearest 2-vCPU VMs cost at the big clouds.

Oracle Cloud is still the only major public cloud that will run a real Linux VM for you, indefinitely, without a monthly invoice — if you stay inside Always Free. The catch in late 2026 is that the Arm box is half the size it was six months ago, and the docs changed before most people got a mail.

This is not a signup walkthrough. It is what the free servers are now, when the quota was cut, and what the nearest 2-vCPU boxes cost at AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, DigitalOcean, and Hetzner if you paid list price in November 2026.

What Always Free compute is today

Oracle’s current Always Free compute page (Always Free Resources, checked November 2026) gives every tenancy, in the home region only:

Two AMD Micros — VM.Standard.E2.1.Micro: 1/8 OCPU (can burst), 1 GB RAM, one VNIC, up to 50 Mbps to the public internet.
Ampere A1 Flex — VM.Standard.A1.Flex: the first 1,500 OCPU-hours and 9,000 GB-hours per month. On a free-only tenancy that is 2 OCPUs and 12 GB RAM running all month, as one VM or two 1-OCPU VMs.
200 GB block + boot volume in the home region, five volume backups, 20 GB object storage, a small load balancer, and Autonomous Database Always Free shapes.

Minimum boot disk is 47–50 GB per instance, taken from that 200 GB pool. Home region cannot be changed after signup. Idle Always Free VMs can be reclaimed if, over seven days, CPU, network, and (on A1) memory stay under 20% at the 95th percentile.

Rows of servers in a data center — Always Free only lives in the home region. Capacity for A1 is still tight in popular regions even after the cut.

The cut: 4 OCPU / 24 GB → 2 OCPU / 12 GB

Ampere A1 landed in Always Free in May 2021: up to 4 OCPUs and 24 GB, billed in hours as 3,000 OCPU-hours and 18,000 GB-hours a month. That is what made Oracle the default “free VPS” for homelab reverse proxies, small Docker stacks, and a lot of Ollama experiments.

On 15 June 2026 the published Always Free numbers were halved. There was no blog post and no customer email that most people saw. Docs simply started saying 1,500 OCPU-hours / 9,000 GB-hours — 2 OCPUs and 12 GB on a free-only account. InfoQ and Heise reported it in July after instances that still sat on 4 / 24 were stopped or users noticed the new text.

Oracle later put a console banner on some Pay As You Go tenancies: the update “does not affect your paid resources, existing paid workloads or bill.” Support tickets went both ways. The public doc line is still “All tenancies get the first 1,500 OCPU hours…” If you are PAYG and still running 4 / 24, treat anything above 2 / 12 as something that can start billing, and do not assume you can recreate 4 / 24 after a terminate. Free-only accounts that stayed over the new cap were told to resize or stay down.

People working in a control room with large screens — June 2026 was a docs-first change. If you still have a 4 OCPU A1, check the console quota before the next reclaim or resize.

How the two eras compare

	May 2021 – 14 June 2026	From 15 June 2026
A1 shape	VM.Standard.A1.Flex	Same shape
Free OCPU / RAM	4 OCPU / 24 GB	2 OCPU / 12 GB (free-only)
Monthly hour pool	3,000 OCPU-h / 18,000 GB-h	1,500 OCPU-h / 9,000 GB-h
AMD Micro	2 × E2.1.Micro, 1 GB each	Unchanged
Block volume	200 GB home region	Unchanged
If you stay above the new cap	—	Free-only: instance stopped until you shrink. PAYG: possible bill for the extra 2 OCPU / 12 GB

AMD Micro never got the same haircut. The thing people actually used as a daily server — the Arm Flex VM — is what lost half its cores and RAM.

Close-up of a circuit board — A1 is Ampere Altra (Arm). One Oracle OCPU on A1 is one physical core. That is closer to 1 vCPU on a dedicated-core Arm VM than to a burstable “2 vCPU” label.

What the same kind of box costs elsewhere

Nobody else sells a permanent free 2-core / 12 GB VM. The table below is the nearest on-demand list price for a 2-vCPU machine, Linux, one month ≈ 730 hours, November 2026. AWS numbers are us-east-1 compute only (no EBS, no public IPv4). Azure / GCP are typical East-US / us-east1 list. Hetzner and DigitalOcean include a disk and usually an IPv4. These are not quotes; they move.

Provider	Nearest shape	CPU / RAM	Free tier?	Paid list / month
Oracle Always Free	A1 Flex + 2× Micro	2 OCPU / 12 GB Arm + two 1 GB AMD	Yes, for the life of the tenancy if you stay inside the cap	$0
AWS	t4g.large (Graviton)	2 vCPU / 8 GB (burstable)	No always-free VM. New accounts after 15 Jul 2025 get credits for 6 months, not a forever micro	≈ $49 compute
AWS	m7g.large	2 vCPU / 8 GB dedicated Graviton	No	≈ $60 compute
AWS	r7g.large	2 vCPU / 16 GB (closest RAM to 12 GB)	No	≈ $78 compute
Google Cloud	e2-micro	~0.25 shared vCPU / 1 GB	Always Free: one e2-micro, full hours, only us-west1 / us-central1 / us-east1 + 30 GB disk	$0 inside the cap
Google Cloud	e2-standard-2	2 vCPU / 8 GB	No	≈ $50–70 by region
Azure	B1s / B2pts v2 / B2ats v2	1–2 burstable vCPU, 1–4 GB	750 hours each, 12 months, new accounts only	$0 for a year, then list
Azure	D2ps_v5 (Arm) class	2 vCPU / 8 GB	No	typically $50–70 Linux PAYG
DigitalOcean	Basic Droplet	2 vCPU / 4 GB + 80 GB disk	No lasting free VM	$24
Hetzner	CX23 / CAX11 class	2 vCPU / 4 GB + NVMe	No	about €4–6 (CX23 often sold out); CPX22 ≈ €20

Earth from orbit with city lights — List price is the wrong way to buy AWS or Azure. It is the right way to see why Oracle’s remaining 2 / 12 still looks cheap next to a Graviton on-demand VM.

Read the table as bands, not as a shopping cart. A paid t4g.large is only 8 GB and it is burstable; Oracle’s remaining A1 is 12 GB on two full Arm cores. To get 16 GB on AWS Graviton you are on r7g.large around $78 before disk and IPv4. DigitalOcean and Hetzner undercut the hyperscalers on a 2 / 4 box, but neither gives you 12 GB for free, and Hetzner’s cheapest CX23 is frequently out of stock.

On the free-tier side, Google’s e2-micro is the only other “forever” VM, and it is a 1 GB shared core in three US regions. Azure’s B-series hours die after a year. AWS, for accounts opened on or after 15 July 2025, moved from “750 hours of t2/t3.micro for 12 months” to a credit + 6-month free plan. Oracle is still the outlier: smaller than 2021, still larger than anyone else’s permanent free VM.

Network cables in a switch — Egress is the other half of the bill. Oracle Always Free includes a small outbound allowance; AWS on-demand egress and a paid IPv4 add up faster than the VM itself on a tiny site.

What you should actually run on it now

A 2 OCPU / 12 GB A1 is still enough for Caddy or nginx, a few containers, a small Postgres, a personal VPN, or CI runners that are not compiling Chromium. It is no longer a comfortable home for several 7B models at once. The two AMD Micros are useful as extra public IPs or as canaries, not as app servers.

If you created the tenancy to sit on 4 / 24, resize to 2 / 12 (or two 1 / 6) before Oracle does it for you. Turn on a $1 budget alert if the account is PAYG. Keep a second copy of the SSH key. And do not treat “Always Free” as a contract — June 2026 showed the quota can move in the docs first.

Sources for the numbers above: Oracle Always Free Resources, oracle.com/cloud/free, InfoQ / Heise on the June 2026 cut, AWS EC2 us-east-1 on-demand for t4g / m7g / r7g, Google Cloud Free Program (e2-micro), Azure free VM hours, DigitalOcean Basic Droplet list, Hetzner Cloud list as of November 2026.