Yes, we have a free $300 Credit and also Always Free Cloud Services just like other Cloud Vendors, give it a shot. (PS I work at Oracle). https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/
I feel like it's relevant to mention that Oracle recently disabled all of the free tier virtual machines from every one of their cloud customers and after like a week of downtime with no public announcements, they were somehow restored.
So yeah, that should give everyone a pretty good idea of their reliability if they are not multi-million dollar customers.
I doubt you can do anything about it, but Oracle Cloud simply refuse to work with any of Russian credit cards. Registration simply fails at the end no matter what card is used and support send you to bank / payment provider and payment provider sent you back to Oracle.
I never had such problems with any other hosting company. I'm live between different countries so I registered it anyway, but still...
As I said in my post I just have access to cards from other countries too so I just registered that way. Though many of my clients are still in Russia and I guess they'll likely to have exactly same issue in case they decide to register account for their business.
OFC I'll try to do it again, but I wouldn't be posting on HN in first place if support would give anything like a useful reply.
Yes, I wouldn't recommend mail server on the free tier but bandwidth issue should not occur, which region are you provisioned for? That could be a factor. Anyways just contact support and someone should help you quickly https://www.oracle.com/corporate/contact/ (also try talk using the life chat on website)
So yeah, that should give everyone a pretty good idea of their reliability if they are not multi-million dollar customers.