[petronic]

What worked for me was handing them a credit card and transitioning myself out of the free tier. (I'd use the free credits they offer prior to doing this - they give you something like $300 immediately on signup.)

The always-free infra remains free, you just have the chance of incurring a bill if you make selections that aren't free or exceed block storage/egress (200GB/10TB) limits of the always-free tier. Leaving the free/trial tier gives you access to a much larger pool of instances. I never successfully deployed an A1 instance prior to becoming a "paying" customer - now I've done it hundreds of times without ever having an issue.

I've been running a small k0s cluster and a standalone webserver for months while incurring about $2.50 - $3 in spending each month, primarily from being slow to remove instance snapshots sitting in block storage.

Even things that are oddly expensive on AWS - like NAT - are free on Oracle. There are zero gotchas.

[Peacefulz]

I hit the same roadblock as the above user and it never occurred to me to just cross the barrier with cash and then scale back to free. Thanks for this.

[elantile]

It doesn't actually charge you anything. You just have to put a card down to be considered a priority because now you potentially can spend money & therefore are more important then the other free-tier losers. /s It's still free tier & still free.

The free tier is also based on capcity usage, and not instances. If you want 3 cores on 1 machine & 1 on another, they're cool with that. I personally run Pangolin on a 1 core & self-hosted github runners on a 3 core.