[pgm8705]

I agree. I have been using Oracle cloud for free for about a year now for a side project that is used in production with paying customers. I had my reservations at first, but figured it was worth a shot to save me the $15/month I was paying Digital Ocean. So far so good.

FWIW, I have a close family member who works for Oracle and they claim that they're sincerely trying to be developer/start-up friendly in hopes to gain traction in the cloud space. I get that the default is to assume there is always a hidden agenda with Oracle, but it is possible they're trying to show some good faith here.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

There's no contradiction there. Of course they want to be developer+startup friendly in order to get traction in the cloud space. How else would they get more people to extort in the future?

[zdragnar]

I'm less concerned that they're operating in good faith than that there are multiple competing interests within Oracle. Once (if?) their cloud offering gains traction, someone somewhere else in the org will decide that the free tier is costing them too much, and the screws start getting tightened.

They aren't unique among big companies to have offered utterly opaque and punitive pricing terms, but if they hope to use the free tier to attract developers into recommending Oracle to their employers, I have a hard time imagining it will be successful given what a terrible experience older folk have had with them.

Perhaps someday, people will forget the lawnmower analogy (and the reasons behind it) and they can start fresh, I guess.