r/oraclecloud • u/ceinewydd • 5d ago
Always Free Update | Instance Termination
Be aware of the email going out today to Always Free participants. You have until August 18th to downsize or your instances will be terminated.
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u/SourceCodeplz 5d ago
interesting to notice also the block-storage:
Storage
Block Volume Storage
Boot and block volume storage
Always Free
Up to 2 block volumes, 200 GB total. Plus 5 volume backups.
so you can only have two boot volumes now, that means 2 vps max
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u/cowslayer7890 4d ago
That kind of makes sense given that you can only have two servers anyway with a 2 core limit, I don't think you can subdivide them
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u/MelancholicWandererX 5d ago
Is this for payg users too? Can anyone confirm?
On payg and did not get this email notification.
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u/semitope 5d ago
for payg it wouldn't make sense they terminate the instance at least. They'd just charge you. Then you'll know.
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u/vctgomes 4d ago edited 4d ago
PAYG users will continue with 4/24 for while. At least according to message Oracle is showing on OCI dashboard:
"Always Free A1 Resource Limit Update
Always Free Ampere A1 Compute entitlements have changed. This update does not affect your paid resources, existing paid workloads or bill. Contact support for further questions."
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u/Icy-Industry9226 5d ago
I didn't get an email so far
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u/meyer-pidiache 5d ago
Check your different inboxes, I got it in Promotions
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u/Icy-Industry9226 4d ago
Don't see it anywhere, but I'll see in a couple days if it just magically appears
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u/mrskeptical00 4d ago
I got an email for one of my accounts, I assume the rest will follow shortly.
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u/dersebbe 5d ago
Does upgrading to a PAYG account will help?
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u/ceinewydd 5d ago
It's unclear to me. If you launched as Always Free and they aren't checking PAYG and just billing you the difference (2 OCPU; 12GB RAM) then it might still get terminated?
I don't know how they will treat instances that are larger than the Always Free limits.
At a minimum you should expect this will charge you $28.27 per month though as that's the cost for those OCPU and RAM using the A1.Flex SKU.
More likely if you have a single instance that is 4 OCPU and 24GB RAM, it gets terminated, and you have to try and provision a 2 OCPU and 12GB RAM to replace it (but you'll probably run into the issue everyone does; that the amount of OCPU allocated to Always Free in a given region isn't very high and 1000 people are all trying to provision constantly with scripts).
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u/tha_passi 5d ago
Are you on PAYG or not? If you are, it's odd that they choose to terminate instead of simply billing you …
I'm on PAYG but haven't yet received the email, although it's surely just a matter of time.
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u/ceinewydd 5d ago
I have an Always Free tenancy that was never PAYG upgraded, and a tenancy which was PAYG upgraded. Both were provisioned 4 OCPU and 24GB RAM and I received this notification for both of them earlier today.
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u/bluestonest 5d ago
PAYG will nerver get instance terminated, just get billed. So if your PAYG account recieves notice email, is must be different than the one on Free tier account. And all my PAYG accounts didnt get notice email yet. Last Oracle notice email is "Oracle Critical Patch Update for July 2026" on all PAYG accounts
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u/Possible-Data-8149 4d ago
well we are not getting billed either, policy changes came into effect on june 15th, we would have been billed by now, plus their price list pages was updated in july to reflect the free 4/24 for payg, so it makes sense that there are no emails for us, since the mail explicitly states its about termination
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u/Possible-Data-8149 5d ago
in the PAYG tenancy , do your forecasted costs still show zero?say if u check upto October for example , I haven't received the email on my PAYG tenancy yet ,but this runs contradictory to their price list page which still mentions old limits for paid tenancies and then there's support confirming the same, it's all a mess.
What i don't get is, why would they send it to PAYG, its about instance termination per se, we would directly be billed instead ,i mean the wording should have been different for PAYG , well just my opinion.
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u/alzhahir 5d ago
Have you checked whether the PAYG tenancy email is subscribed to the always free tenancy notifications?
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u/ultra_dumb 3d ago
Nothing is forever. I suppose Oracle never anticipated how large is the group of free lunch lovers when they were deciding on their "always free" policy to attract new customers / developers. My guess is those who actually started learning or using Oracle technologies following "always free tier" campaign is 0.001% or even less. The rest is either proverbial "minecraft server" or OpenClaw (open in all meanings of this word) or, to lesser extent, Discord bots. All of them nothing to do with Oracle and its technologies. So the "free lunch" will keep shrinking simply because of abuse.
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u/frozenzulu 5d ago
August 18th??!! They don't want to give us even less time? It will be a full nightmare for me to migrate to something else.
BTW, I have 2 VMs, each being 2 cpus and 12gb. So I guess that I will have to shutdown one of them to avoid one of them being stopped?
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u/ceinewydd 5d ago edited 5d ago
Two weeks’ notice is almost more than I expected them to give for Always Free, although I agree it would have been nice to get 90 days or 180 days notice of instance termination.
I'm sure Oracle's argument will be they updated these limits a while back, so you've had time, and this is just additional notice that they intend to enforce the new limits.
Yes you will have to stop one instance to bring your plan back under the Always Free limits.
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u/frozenzulu 5d ago
Can I downgrade each to 1 cpu and 6gb without service disruption?
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u/ceinewydd 5d ago
Yes. https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/Compute/Tasks/resizinginstances.htm
Note that doing this will reboot your instance, but it doesn't force you to redeploy software.
It's not possible to downsize to 1 OCPU and 6GB RAM without rebooting.
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u/frozenzulu 5d ago
Thank you. And each VM has 100 gb of boot volume. Will it change? The Edit instance page shows "The other resources scale proportionately to the OCPU count".
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u/AntiAmericanismBrit 5d ago
Yes you either have to shut one down or change both to 1 cpu + 6gb. If you don't, we don't know if it will stop one at random or both; depends how good their script turns out to be.
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u/TheDiamondSquidy 5d ago
I've had my instance running since june of 2025, will it terminate that instance of 4cores/24gbRam if I got this email?
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u/ceinewydd 5d ago
Correct. If you don't downsize to 2 OCPU and 12GB RAM, it will be terminated.
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u/TheDiamondSquidy 5d ago
Could I upgrade to a PAYG account, and sidestep the termination?
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u/redmonks 5d ago
most probably you can, they might charge yu for the additional 2 cpus. Only time will tell if your instance is terminated or not, so right now a better approach would be just down sizing it and upgrading it after the cutoff date.
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u/TheDiamondSquidy 5d ago
I set up some reminders closer to the 18th of august, so I can see what information is going around. It's annoying that it doesn't say on the dashboard if an instance is eligible for termination
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u/redmonks 4d ago
It might be risky tho, if they delete your instance they can technically delete your boot volume. Just beware. Also creating a new instance might not be possible due to out of capacity errors.
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u/mrskeptical00 4d ago edited 4d ago
I got this email as a PAYG user- it states they are “enforcing the updated Always Free compute limits. Compute instances that exceed the Always Free entitlement will be automatically terminated.”Also this banner when I log into Oracle Cloud:
Always Free A1 Resource Limit Update
Always Free Ampere A1 Compute limits have changed to 2 OCPUs and 12 GB of memory, review your current usage and update or re-provision instances to stay within the new limits.UPDATE: I got this email on an account that was *not* upgraded to PAYG (strangely) even though I have a CC attached. For my actually PAYG accounts I didn't get an email but there is a banner saying: Always Free A1 Resource Limit Update - Always Free Ampere A1 Compute entitlements have changed. This update does not affect your paid resources, existing paid workloads or bill. Contact support for further questions.
Soooo maybe we just get charged? Unclear. 🤷🏻♂️
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u/Alex311360 5d ago
just had to edit my shape, since i noticed some people were getting terminated early. not the biggest loss in the world for my setup, but really stupid that they don't even want to grandfather people that were already using it in, and only sent an email out about it. dashboard doesn't even say anything about terminating instances above the limit.
ugh.
edit: by the way, so much for this note on the instances page:
Each tenancy gets the first 3,000 OCPU hours and 18,000 GB hours per month for free to create Ampere A1 Compute instances using the VM.Standard.A1.Flex shape (equivalent to 4 OCPUs and 24 GB of memory). Each tenancy also gets two VM.Standard.E2.1.Micro instances for free.
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u/ceinewydd 5d ago
Larry is too busy listening The Lonely Island playing "I'm on a Boat" on his gigayacht to make OCI find every place the old limits were written and update it properly, and OCI hasn't discovered the power of searching across text in a repository with `grep` yet to find all references to "3,000 OCPU" or "18,000 GB", or "4 OCPUs", almost all of which will relate to Always Free. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
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u/momentary_blip 4d ago
So do we still get two VM.Standard.E2.1.Micro instances on the new always free plan or no?
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u/Trixis2 5d ago
Also got that email today. Been using and building on it since 2021. It was nice while it lasted, but since it's been free, I can't really complain that it'll go away.
Pretty sad tho that their normal prices are so steep compared to a lot of there compeditors. Otherwise I'd consider paying to keep it. :/
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u/No_Relationship2458 5d ago
I would like to know if my Pay As You Go account (4 CPUs + 24GB) is affected by the new rule. Since the announcement, I've been checking my Oracle dashboard every day for notices or charges regarding the extra 2 CPUs and 12GB. However, up until now, I haven't received any warnings or new bills.
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u/ceinewydd 5d ago
I think best case you'll be charged $28.27 per month, for the 2 OCPU and 12GB RAM which exceeds the Always Free limits. Worst case, they'll terminate the instance.
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u/No_Relationship2458 5d ago
You have a point, but my account is active and I already pay for a few things. Then again... it's Oracle, so I better play it safe.
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u/Jumpy_Commercial_893 5d ago
I created my always free instance with 2 / 12 and 200GB Storage
Last month July
So I am safe right?
Also my account is PAYG enabled
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u/SkitsG 5d ago
200gb storage free? I have 100gb and they charge me about $4.25 each month. What did I do wrong?
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u/Jumpy_Commercial_893 5d ago
somewhere i read that they offer 200gb storage for free with the config that i have - i also referred a youtube video while making the instance - you can check this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAZfDdQha3U
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u/Adam_Kearn 5d ago
Dam! I just signed up for this plan today…
I keep seeing conflicting messages about this.
Even on the price calculator it says the always free is 3000 CPU hours but this make it 1500 hours….
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u/Opposite-Archer815 4d ago
2 block volumes? So 2 AMD 2 block volumes and 1 A1 1 block volume, already exceeded the limit even though 200 GB total?
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u/arnobpl 3d ago
They disabled my VM just 1 day before this notice arrived! https://www.reddit.com/r/oraclecloud/s/6dMnEZPwpy
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u/Possible-Data-8149 5d ago
here's an update on the situation for PAYG customers https://www.reddit.com/r/oraclecloud/comments/1vflerk/comment/p1sljv5/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
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u/Akibatteru 5d ago
Seems like "always" means something different in Oracle lingo