olya
Member
OP
Always Free
- Joined:
- Jun 2024
- Posts:
- 159
- From:
- Warsaw, PL
Short answer: yes, but only if you treat it like a pet that might run away.
What changed in 2025-2026:
- Reclaim waves got aggressive. They batch-delete idle Always Free instances every 6-8 weeks now, not the old quarterly pattern.
- ARM capacity is a lottery. I monitor three regions: US-East usually has Ampere A1, but EU-West and APAC are dry for weeks.
- Idle detection is stricter. Sub-5% CPU for 7 days = flagged. I run a cron'd micro-benchmark to stay safe.
Pro tip: automate your rebuilds. I keep Terraform state in a free Vultr bucket and can spin back up in 12 minutes.
Heads up: the 200GB block volume is NOT exempt from reclaim if the attached VM is terminated. Snapshot to object storage.
My current free fleet:
- 2x ARM VM (4 OCPU, 24GB RAM) — US-East
- 1x AMD VM (1 OCPU, 1GB RAM) — spare
- 2x 100GB boot volumes, 1x 200GB
licensing is a suggestion
sarahjey
Member
- Joined:
- Jul 2024
- Posts:
- 149
- From:
- Ottawa, Canada
Do you need a credit card for the always free stuff? I only have debit and im worried about getting charged accidentally. Also 73% uptime sounds scary for like a portfolio site?
Thank you so much for the detailed post though! Really helpful
learning on $5 VPS and prayers
hankels
Member
52 VPS and counting
- Joined:
- Jun 2024
- Posts:
- 301
- From:
- Phoenix, US
Debit works, they just do a $1 hold. I run 52 boxes across 8 providers and Oracle is the only free one where I track "cost per hour of my life spent keeping it alive"
Math:
- Oracle A1: $0, ~2hrs/month babysitting
- Contabo 2GB KVM: €4/mo, zero babysitting
- OVHcloud NAT 512MB: €4/mo, zero babysitting
At my hourly rate Oracle is actually the MOST expensive. But I still have 3 because numbers go brrr
My reclaim scorecard:
- Deleted twice in 2024
- Deleted ZERO times in 2025 after I wrote a keepalive script
- Deleted AGAIN last month because I forgot to move it to the new script
seedbox, NAS, tape, and three offsite
garykwh
Member
Inference on a Budget
- Joined:
- Jun 2024
- Posts:
- 173
- From:
- San Jose, US
Ngl the ARM cores are legit for inference if you win the lottery lol
I got a 4-core A1 with 24GB last month, threw llama.cpp on it with Q4_K_M 7B. 8 tokens/sec. Not fast but free is free
VRAM math: 24GB system RAM minus 4GB OS overhead = 20GB usable. Fits 13B Q4 too but barely. CPU bottleneck hard at that point
The reclaim thing tho. I had a model server running for a discord bot, got wiped mid-generation. User asked why bot went dumb for 6 hours. Awkward
CUDA cores are my love language
tallinnying
Member
Night Shift
- Joined:
- Aug 2024
- Posts:
- 268
- From:
- Tallinn, EE
3am experiment: can you chain Oracle free tier -> WireGuard -> your mom's router -> back out to internet
Answer: yes. Why: unclear.
#!/bin/bash
# keepalive.sh
# idk why I do this
Stress-ng --cpu 2 --timeout 300s &
Sleep 301
# anyway it works
Running this on 4 instances. 2 got reclaimed anyway because I set cron to 3am and Oracle's idle check is UTC. Math is hard at 3am
💀
builds at 3AM, sleeps at noon
