> To enable us to provide free Oracle Cloud accounts to our valued customers, we need to ensure that account holders are real people. We use your email, phone number, and credit/debit card for account set-up and identity verification. For users in the United States, you may see temporary charges of $1 on your account statement. Users in other countries will see a similar charge in their local currency. These are verification holds that will be removed automatically, typically within 3 to 5 days.
> We will not use your credit/debit card information to automatically upgrade your Always Free or Free Trial to paid without first getting your explicit approval.
I gave a throw away google email and google voice and just used my first initials, the one thing I could not use was a throw away debit card, they really wanted a real credit card.
So far so good.
One guy complained they shut his server off after he transitioned from the $300 free credits in the first month to always free.
I didn't have that issue, although I do check the billing statements periodically.
Oracle and VMware per-socket licensing is one of the main reasons server-class CPUs have gazillions of cores. A vSphere licence+support for a single machine can easily run into 5 figures.