They offered a free tier and forced me to choose a shape. I chose the smallest of the two “shapes” but it was apparently not free. This was not especially clear until I got my first bill (it was extortionate; like 60eur/mo for 1cpu/2g ram) so I stopped/removed the instance.
This did not prevent me from being billed the next month, or the next month. They charged me until my card expired- then they finally cancelled the account and I paid the last bill manually. They then added another 0.1SEK charge (which is not payable, as 1SEK is the lowest denomination of currency).
I still get extremely high quantities of A4 paper through the mail box, at one point it was 29 pages of the same invoice.
I could have done something wrong here, but there is a distinct dark pattern on sign up and there are definitely bugs in the billing system.
Similar problem to me when they acquired apiary. I was in a free tier of apiary which became a paid tier under oracle. They then charged me for months. I finally had to write a letter (yes snail mail) stating that we were going to report them for deceptive trade practices to the attorney general of Texas. They got back to me after a few weeks. They promised a refund…never got that and it’s just not worth fighting.
I will never choose to do business with oracle directly.
It's almost as if now that SCO is fully defunct, they are trying really hard to take the crown of most litigious and absurd *nix related software company in the USA.
Some might think this is a joke, but the IT manager at one place I worked was almost fooled into thinking he had to pay licenses for our MariaDB databases running on AWS after Oracle had got his name from a web form.
This is a different company than the other one I mentioned elsewhere where we resold Oracle and they still tried to extort us.
I figure that info is out there in the wild in the hands of criminals after countless data breaches.
And I'm less worried about those criminals having my data than Oracle. I think they only see the world in two colors: 1) Current customers 2) people to sue. And lots of #1 are in the second category as well.
I wonder what happens if you sign up with a fake name, semi-disposable email address and a prepaid visa gift card that has $3.50 remaining balance on it.
And they do an excellent job as Java’s language steward. Java was revived and has many excellent research and development going for it. Project Loom, Panama, Valhalla came to mind. They also made a low-latency GC.
Did you miss the part where they tried to burn the entire computing industry to the ground so they could get a few bucks out of Google? I wouldn't touch anything related to Oracle with a fifty foot pole, that shit is radioactive.
Except while building the language into a nicer language, they also took the time and effort to rebuild the licenses around it so that it is harder to feel safe using it
The code is GPL, but the official Oracle binaries are not (since Oracle owns the copyright, they are free to release under multiple different licenses) and they use Oracle's predatory "free" licensing - you când download and run for free for 6 months, but you owe them money if you keep running those binaries after the moment the new version is released. There is no explicit enforcement mechanism - it's up to you to be careful, otherwise their lawyers will notice at some point and bill you for all the times you weren't.
> The code is GPL, but the official Oracle binaries are not (since Oracle owns the copyright, they are free to release under multiple different licenses) and they use Oracle's predatory "free" licensing...
And once they started doing that, everyone switched to some flavor of OpenJDK, many distributions of which are backed by organizations of at least Oracle's size.
For the past 2-3 ( may be 4 ) years there is a narrative / movement that Open Source doesn't just mean the sourced code are opened, open source means the "community". And the result of that community must be both free in beer and free as speech.
You've never programmed until you program in assambler. Only than can you start contemplating the path to true mastery, imputting software into tha machine as binary using switches.
We were a paying customer, and the same thing happened. I expect it was lack of competence more than dark patterns, although strategic incompetence is always possible with O. Oracle is not a credible cloud vendor.
This is SOP for Oracle. Company I work for got stung by them to the tune of a couple hundred thousand dollars over a similar deal with Oracle DB licensing. I wouldn't enter into any kind of contract or license with Oracle at all, and if I had to, I'd hire a specialized consultant and a lawyer to go through everything with a fine tooth comb first.
Goodness, for those who don't know, 1 USD ~ 10 SEK. They printed a page to charge someone 10 öre or 1¢. Maybe I don't need that free account after all.
I've been using it for about 3 years without issue, but you're right - you do have to be careful to set it up properly. I've also never gotten any related (or unrelated) physical mail from them about my account.
I had the same experience with AWS ec2 free tier that ran out after a year and started billing me. They bill me $17/mo now even though the machine was shut down and AWS account was closed 2 months ago
What is shape? Reading the doc doesn't make it clear why it is a paid thing. I just signed up for oracle cloud for free account and how to check if I accidentally bought anything?
According to them, it's impossible to accidentally use something that's not free; you have to deliberately upgrade to a paid account. Freshness not guaranteed, salt to taste
Do you not need to provide card details to create an account? Serious question, as I thought you did for AWS, GCP and Azure (with some exceptions for "special" Azure account types).
Enticing, but a part of me is still very hesitant to get in bed with Oracle.
They've gained a reputation of trying to lock customers in so that their legal department can "innovate" more ways of squeezing money out of them.
The common joke remains that Oracle is actually just two law-firms in a software-company trenchcoat.
Until this reputation changes, any offer they present smells suspiciously like a baited hook.
Had IBM Cloud account for a while. At some point, they started to attach a notice to a monthly $0 bill along the lines: if you card gets declined, we will fine you $25 and if you don't pay in 7 days, we will fine you further $50. Easiest account termination decision I have ever had. I guess the first email from Oracle "we are making routine changes to the T&Cs and our privacy policy" will be the end of my account.
I'm not sure that is legal either. You can charge for some product or service but, unless you are a licensed bank, you can't lend out money and charge for overdraft, which is basically something they're doing here.
And even a bank can only do it against accounts open in that bank.
There's no lending of money involved? If your card gets declined, they add a fee to your bill. You can either choose to not pay it (and stop receiving any services from that company, and possibly have your account sent to collections or even be sued since you agreed to pay something and then didn't pay it), or you can pay it.
IANAL But AFAIK in civilised jurisdictions if I offer a service for money, and you offer money, I must offer the service.
If I make up charges for you and you refuse to pay, I can cease offering the service (to everybody) but I cannot just cut you out because you will not pay the out of contract charge.
These laws are to protect people who belong to groups that commonly get discriminated against.
> IANAL But AFAIK in civilised jurisdictions if I offer a service for money, and you offer money, I must offer the service.
First off, you need to stop using the (incredibly loaded) word "civilized".
Second, I am not aware of ANY jurisdiction in which businesses are required to provide their services or products to anyone.
Third, THIS IS NOT AN "OUT OF CONTRACT CHARGE". This is a charge which IS IN THE CONTRACT.
Fourth, anti-discrimination laws have ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with charging someone a fee when they don't pay you in a timely manner and/or cause you to incur higher costs (such as decline fees or NSF fees).
When selling to consumers, you can't force an arbitrary contract on them and demand that they pay you in various tangential circumstances. Neither you are a bank neither them are your insurer.
LOL @ the guy replying to you acting like collection costs ("§ 17. The debtor's responsibility for costs of extrajudicial collection") is somehow relevant... :)
You may be right. It looks like some states have specific rules for credit cards. For example, in some states businesses can't charge credit card processing fees.
However, many businesses charge late payment fees.
In Europe, we don't use chargebacks in most cases. Unless the payment was truly fraudulent (i.e. you cannot get hold of someone who issued the payment or they are not in business of doing things they charged for), you have to use proper legal means of settling the dispute. As you may imagine, the life is too short for things of such kind, especially with multi-billion corps. Anyway, dug up the email:
Please note that all payments are due in full on the monthly anniversary date. Failure to remit payment for services on the monthly anniversary date will result in a $20 late fee. If full payment has not been received within five (5) consecutive days, including the anniversary date, termination of public access to Customer services and a $50 reconnect fee will be incurred. Failure to remit payment for services within seven (7) consecutive days, including the anniversary date, shall result in termination of access to the service network and all services shall be reclaimed.
I always thought that chargeback was the rule of Visa and MasterCard networks, so if you used that for the transaction, you are eligible for it. I wonder what's the extent of my confusion here.
However, I think now I have a better idea why: debit cards have a major share in Europe and the page above says "When you pay with a debit card, you have no right by law to turn to the bank to demand a refund."
But thanks for a reminder, and I will think about using a credit card for online purchases in some cases rather than a debit.
Sure, but Oracle can probably send it to collections and at the very least waste your time getting things fixed at the credit reporting agencies. At most, they'll sell your "debt" to one of those lowlife collections agencies that keeps calling until they get through to family members and then makes veiled threats. It's not legal, but with an unlimited supply of overseas "agents" that isn't really their problem, and it most certainly isn't Oracle's problem.
It was pretty clearly plain language and clear notification.
I have no intent to purchase anything from you, unlike the customers (i.e. people who have and continue to purchase) who this thread is discussing.
An actual analogy would be more like "You all owe me $100 for reading this, if you want to purchase something else from me". Which is completely legal. In any jurisdiction. If you don't like it you're free to go buy from someone else.
If someone has contractually agreed to pay a certain amount if an event happens, and that event happens, then yes, that person has to pay that amount if that event happens.
I can't speak for other jurisdictions, but Norwegian law explicitly says that you can't demand payment in that case, even if you have a contract that says otherwise.
The Norwegian law you referenced appears to say you can't charge for debt collection (unless conditions are met). This has nothing to do with debt collection. In fact it has nothing to do with debt. But you know what man, go ahead, try and scam someone with an NSF or decline and see how it goes.
(Disclaimer: I don't speak Norwegian or any of the other languages)
I played around with Oracles free tier. When you first sign up, you must choose a “home” region. You cannot add another region on the free plan.
These awesome free instances are very limited stock. You have no way of knowing if the region you choose has stock of the desired instances before you select the region. You may not change your “home” region.
Yeah, I signed up specifically to try out the Ampere instances (and when chosing the home region it said x, y, z were at capacity so I chose w), but wasn't able to actually create an Ampere instance because of lack of availability. I ended up just using a free x86 instance for a different project, but it was pretty disappointing.
I typically use some number I find on the company's website, like: https://www.oracle.com/corporate/contact/ Same for web feedback forms where I don't want follow-up questions, sales@domain.biz.
You can change the zone within the region. There were no free Ampere instances in the Frankfurt AZ1, I found them in AZ2. Though it only works for the Ampere. 1vCPU x86 VM can only be spun up in AZ1.
Gotcha. I had signed up in a US region and there was nary an ARM server to be found. I was quite disappointed. Then sales people reminded me of my disappointment weeks after.
I signed up months ago so I could get enough virtual crap to start a "working" k8s cluster for messing around with, doing CV KA etc. Haven't used it yet (doing other stuff) but am planning on kicking off next month. I got a single salesy email, and I replied that the account is for personal use, I have no money and no intention of monetising my tire-kicking, so it's forever free-tier. That was the end of it. You also have to explicitly flip a switch so they are allowed to charge you. If you don't, you simply can't deploy anything beyond the free tier. That's my understanding of their documentation of the free tier, but that was made clear enough.
You have to keep trying. Capacity renews every so often. Save the VM as a job and try to run it every day or so, or there's a script floating around that you can run on one of the tiny standard free VMs to attempt until it works
I've been using it for a year for one of their Ampere instances and haven't received any phone calls.
Might be because I'm in the UK (region UK South (London)), I imagine they're much more call happy in countries where the laws are looser.
In the US. When you first sign up you are initially placed in a free trial. After the free trial period ends you fallback to the free tier. While in the free trial period I received one phone call which I let go to voicemail and besides the emails welcoming me to Oracle Cloud and regarding account creation I received 3 or 4 reminding me that the trial was ending and I would revert to the free tier. Since then, which has been months, I haven't received either calls or emails.
"Oracle" and "free" in the same sentence raises alarms. I've seen many years of Oracle filling their "free" offerings with horrible trap doors into massive amounts of financial obligation that are way too easy to accidentally fall through.
Everyone here is dogging on Oracle, and they are justified probably, however I've been a user of the free tier for going on 7 months now. I run a few projects on an AMD instance and an Ampere instance, both fall under the Always Free tier (Ampere isn't "always free" but as part of Always Free, Oracle basically credits your account to the equivalent of 4xCPU and 24GB of RAM every 31 days.) I've never been charged anything, I don't even have a credit card on file for them to charge.
I will say that the documentation around their services is much worse than AWS. I oftentimes struggle to figure out where to configure things or which services to use. Other than that, it's been fine. If you're really looking for a free VM, I would say check it out.
One piece of advice I'd give is look at regions outside of the US. I selected their Toronto region and I've had zero issues provisioning new instances, whereas most people having trouble provisioning free-tier instances are in the more popular US regions.
Don't run your critical business apps on it. But perfectly usable for personal projects and learning the cloud without spending money.
Edit:
Just to add, running a speedtest from my Toronto A1 instance to Los Angeles California
I signed a few months ago and overall the experience have been positive. Initially there was an issue with the availability of the A1 instances (Switzerland North) but after a few trials I managed to grab one. You also get some free credit to spend during the first month ($300 I believe) so I was running with 32 vCPUs, 128GB ram, and 32Gbps network. I have now downscaled to the free tier.
I was a bit disappointed with the selection of operating systems but fortunately you can upload your own image (QCOW2) and create an instance from it (I'm running Alpine now). You can even upload your VMs directly from VirtualBox but I haven't tried that (right click -> Export to OCI).
Getting IPv6 working was a bit of a hassle because it's not enabled by default and you need to make changes in multiple places [0] but it works fine now. There's a good enough Cost Analysis section where you can see your current usage broken down to days and you can create alerts based on that. Overall I find the Administration Console to be more pleasant than Amazon's but still miles behind Scaleway's.
There is no reasonable question for which “Oracle” is a good answer. The brand “Oracle” has rapidly evolved into a signal of “badness” in the same way as white mould on fruit, or chromatic slime on meat. Stay away!
> There is no reasonable question for which “Oracle” is a good answer.
"Which company's certifications should you go with, if you want to have a career in enterprise development or enterprise consulting?"
"Which database should you go with in an enterprise setting for governmental projects, if you know that you'll be out the door in 2 years and don't want to deal with back pressure from ops/management in the mean time?"
Though i get what you mean, for many those would also be red flags, such as not being allowed to use PostgreSQL due to some client's or organization's lack of experience with technologies like that and/or unwillingness to adopt anything new.
As the saying goes: "No one ever got fired for choosing IBM." where you can replace IBM with something else, depending on the regional and social circumstances (such as Oracle or MS products).
For example, in my country, many governmental systems still run on the old .NET and Windows servers, which utterly baffles me, since in my experience dealing with those servers is harder than it would be in something like Linux based distros (though personally i still think that Windows does desktops a bit better in workstations).
I should probably have qualified my first statement: There is no longer a reasonable question for which "Oracle" is a good answer.
I agree that Oracle definitely used to be the right answer for enterprise development. These days however, the senior management panacea du-jour is AWS.
I'm not sure about that: there are companies in this country, which have a heavy buy in into Azure products and offerings. Similarly for Oracle, GCP and also the same way for AWS. And attempting to use the platform that's not adopted in the company (e.g. wanting AWS when Oracle is what's been used for years) is a non starter.
The reasons for choosing one over the other are probably plentiful, as are the advantages and disadvantages of each. Personally, i think that the cloud more or less always results in bunches of risks and vendor lock. Of course, one can also talk about the track record of each of the companies, but i think that all of them fail a litmus test in one way or another (Google with privacy issues, Microsoft with "embrace, extend, extinguish", Amazon with what working there is like, Oracle with their licensing).
Most people out there want managed services for some reason, rather than to run their own FOSS software instances in containers or something. I guess maybe because they don't want to be the ones held responsible for something not working, since saying that "the Azure/GCP/AWS/Oracle service is down" absolves them of much responsibility.
2) When I checked today the free Ampere instance was a 1 core, 6GB of memory, 1 Gbps network bandwidth, and up to 2 virtual NICs.
Edit: I spoke too soon. After selecting it I was able to increase the CPU count to 4 and 24GB of memory. I provisioned with Ubuntu 20.04, logged in and I see 4 CPUs and 24GB of memory. Cool.
The free x86 instance is 1 core, 1GB of memory, 0.48 Gbps network bandwidth, and up to 1 virtual NIC.
Can't even sign up. Gives generic error about "payment / registration failed" - its a regular credit card that I use everywhere. Oh well...kinda glad to be honest.
Knowing Oracle it will eventually become a nightmare anyway (whoops, we accidentally billed you $70 for the free-tier, but you need to manually call this long-distance number between the hours of 9am-4pm to reverse the charge and this also happens to be our sales dept)
Lest folks not read the actual article, STH is pretty happy about this offering:
> To us, this is a big deal. This is perhaps one of the best “free” instances that one can get. Something that we really like about Oracle’s Always Free tier is that one can use it without being as worried about overages as with Amazon’s offering. AWS has a size advantage, but Oracle has a great Always Free Tier offering.
I've had an account for a couple of years and I might have received a survey email once, but otherwise I have received only things like notifications about infrastructure changes and there haven't been many of those.
You can install Debian (and other distributions) by downloading the netboot.xyz EFI boot image, then open a "cloud connection", reboot the instance, press ESC, and then boot from file.
Uh, whaaaat? I am a legit Java hater, but “friends don’t let friends use Java” is kinda a bizarre viewpoint. You know how much of our industry uses Java? I may prefer other languages but I’m not turning down a job based on them having settled on Java. It’s not PHP. :D
I should have specified Oracle Java; in any way, shape, or capacity. Keyword: Oracle. I figured I didn't have to explicitly state "Oracle Java", but pedants happen.
So I been using the service for a couple months now, and I been accumulating charges on my free account related to "Block Volume - Performance Units", which is small 0.03+ charges added to default "Balanced Setting" free disk volume each month, and 0.03 a day is smallest amount it accumulates, when hosting stuff on there I accumulated 0.55 cents.
So if you want truly free, you need to select "Lower Cost" by placing the slider down to 0 VPU.
Still I feel like it's a matter time with all these hidden not so free nobs until I get slammed with big cloud bills.
Side note, can't delete my Tenancy (get an error) or my Account(waiting for something from support).
Edit* $0.55 for this month, supposedly I owe $10.56 this year for these VPU's, but I am free tier so not sure how this is going work?
Nothing vast enters the life of mortals without a curse.
On a side note I do use their free tier stuff (the amd vps-es) to host my website and it's been fine. Used the ampere instance to transfer stuff between two rclone encrypted remotes and haven't had issues so far.
Be careful though, the ampere instances aren't treated as "always free" so after the trial period ends, they get suspended and you either have to contact them or delete the instances and set them up from scratch... Had to spend a few hours setting up a book stack app instance again.
Been using it for months for a Minecraft server. Runs 10+ players with mods without much difficulty. I limited the RAM usage to 6GB though so that the Garbage Collector doesn't go nuts.
No. More accurately: with very large heaps the default performance characteristics of the GC might be different than what you’d like it to be. For example you might get huge throughput but occasional long GC pauses.
This very much depends on the GC you're using. But yes, a full GC will take longer the more memory you have. Therefore you want to avoid full GCs like the plague.
There's absolutely no way Oracle will continue giving this away free indefinitely. With the rush they're likely to get just from this being on HN, I'd be surprised if it wasn't at least temporarily disabled because of over-subscription.
As an aside, I've looked at Oracle Cloud before, and pricing definitely seems favourable compared to the big 3, and IIRC they even include a good chunk of bandwidth for free. But... I just don't trust Oracle. Now, it might well be that Oracle Cloud is completely separate from the rest of Oracle, in which case I might be more tempted - anyone here work at Oracle Cloud and can share, even with a throwaway if you're too embarrassed to admit to it? :P
I worked for an adtech business unit at Oracle until recently (my choice to leave). It's a massive organization of over 100,000 employees (not to mention contractors AFAIK). Every business unit is run kinda like separate companies with their own cultures and practices and whatnot.
There are better and worse orgs and managers as you would expect of a company of that size.
As far as I can tell there was literally no specific "Oracle" culture. Some of the well-known cultures attributed to "Oracle" may be true of specific business units like Oracle database or ERP but it's hard to say without having been in every one of those business units. But my adtech business unit was nothing like the nightmare/FUD stories you hear online.
This might be the first Oracle product I use. That means down the line I might have an informed opinion to share in business decisions where Oracle provides a solution. Pretty smart.
They’re definitely not doing well in the “casual cloud user” space, which hurts them because nobody is familiar with their console and APIs. Everyone knows how to do stuff on AWS because we’ve all done personal throwaway projects there. Somewhere else in this thread someone posted their notes on the confusing console, and reading through it, it doesn’t look any more complicated than AWS to me, but familiarity is valuable. Maybe this is a play for that type of usage.
It's free because no one would choose them over AWS, GCP, etc if it cost anything. The second they think they no longer have to dangle free things in front of developers in order to get their business, it will no longer be free.
Necro-ing this post because I, too, was tempted to check this out. So I opened an Oracle Cloud account on the 10th, though I never created any instances. All I did was setup MFA on the account (which, BTW, was obscenely difficult to enable) and look around a bit. Oracle makes you add a credit card during account creation and they do a $1.00 temporary charge to make sure the card is valid.
Well, here we are 3 days later and I have 3 x $1.00 charges pending on my credit card from Oracle (2 on the 10th and 1 today). I don't know if these charges will actually post to my card or disappear like they're supposed to; but this doesn't look good.
I wonder how many startups hit that 3.3x price increase at 25 months and scramble to move elsewhere because the costs were still higher than they should have been at 70% off?
2.55 dollars/month for an extra 100GB -- you get 200GB free but they are hard to come buy because of where they are located. I ended up getting the entire free tier as expected, except for the storage which wasn't available in the region I selected.
Of course, nobody really likes Oracle. But it is pretty cool and impressive that Ampere is able to trade blows favorably with something the size of Amazon.
I've just created an ubuntu instance (2 core / 6 gigs / 50 gigs disk) without any issues. The process is a bit clunky and not too user friendly, but you have lots of customization options before you deploy your server.
From what I can see, thee free tier gives you up to 4 cores / 24 gigs and up to 200 gigs of disk space. You can create up to 4 servers, or use all resources in 1 server.
How will any of these be available? If they're free and unrestricted, people will squat them and never give them up. Why would you ever give up any of these? And if you don't need payment details, you can just make multiple accounts to squat them.
If AWS can pull the plugs on paying customer earlier this year due to political reasons, why wouldn't Larry do so to free tiers for business reasons. Those squatters will get evicted easily just like any squatters in America. Since they have very limited means to engage lawyers, every courts in America will hand Larry a hall pass easily. As many have said, you just simply don't invite vampires in no matter how voluptuous and scantily-dressed or muscular Tom-Cruise-handsome.
They're also giving free e-training and certs until the end of the year. If you don't already know Oracle there's not much time to study, but if you do you can sit some remote exams for free
During the last ARM HPC User Group conf i was able to get my hands a 160 core instance, i was shocked, holy moly do they beat Xeon when it comes to SAT solving in my test with HordeSAT.
Would video encoding be a good use of this free computing offer? How would 4 vCPU + 24GB hold up against x265 encoding? Would pegging CPU at 100% be allowed?
After it's deleted, you can spin it back up again and it'll keep running. Think you can even reuse the same boot volume, but I set mine up again from scratch.
Not sure why they delete it in the first place though, maybe due to capacity issues?
I've run CoreMark PRO on one of those free Ampere 4-core + 24 GB RAM instances, running Oracle Linux 8.4. TL;DR: that free instance performs very very well.
So that free Ampere instance performs slightly better than my i7-10850H on single-core, and just 10% slower on multi-core (and that's considering my i7-10850H has 6 cores, while the Ampere has only 4 cores!!!).
Quite a few negative replies [1], so here's a counterpoint -- Quite a few months back someone on here mentioned using the 24GB/4 core thing for a Minecraft server. While I knew Oracle had a cloud offering, I had never looked at it at all but this enticed me to give it a chance. Not for Minecraft, but lots of time I'm doing things like ETC1 compression of massive textures and I don't want to do it on my MBP. I signed up, got the month free trial (with $300 of credit), and spun up the three "always free" instances (two limited 1 core AMD servers and a 4 core 24GB ARM instance, though I couldn't get the latter until like a week after signing up as there was no availability at the time). All three of these have a public IPv4 which is just super surprising.
These have been perfect since and I have had zero problems. Okay the sales guy in the first month was clearly just bothered by the whole thing (and somehow managed to cancel my account in the process of upgrading it to "paid"), but then it was fixed and everything has been perfect since. On that "personal" account I have had $0 of billing, and they are very clear on billing with up to the moment charting and allocation of every penny billed (not to mention that you can of course set alerts. You would have to really not be paying attention to get surprise billing from this). I've done backups, used volumes, and tried out loads of their services and they have "always free" quotas on loads of stuff. Hilariously I now use one of my AMD instances as the management console to run AWS CLI and kubectl controls for my AWS deployments.
It worked perfectly on me. Since then I've done their "Oracle University" programs and then moved two of my client web applications to Oracle on separate paid accounts, where the pricing is incredibly reasonable (especially the lambda-style functionality which just blows me away). I plan on moving more.
[1] I honestly wonder if some of the negative comments might be people trying to dissuade people from discovering something that seems to be Too Much of A Good Thing. Honestly hesitated posting a positive comment on the chance that if too many people run for freebies it might get the program noticed and clamped down on.
For sure, and I'm not disputing your experience at all but there are hundreds of much vaguer "they're a bad company" style posts that don't have direct experience though.
It's entirely possible that they've improved some of the cost monitoring and management facilities as well. Under "Governance and Administration" you can set a budget -- notably budgets are alerts and not hard budgets, so one should act accordingly -- not only based on actual spend, but even for period forecast spend. It's a great rapid awareness if you accidentally enable a pay feature. There are also regularly updated graphs showing the daily spend charted by source of cost, along with multiple-per-day CSVs with billing details. Another way the Oracle cloud actually helps is that it actually isolates you to a single region (you have to go through a process to do otherwise), so it's harder to have the situation people would encounter on Amazon where they'd accidentally create some resource off in some other region and then it's effectively invisible but costly (though AWS now has the global dashboard that really improved that).
What is "free" or not could be clearer. For instance they have a terminology issue with a conflict between "Free tier" and "always free". Sometimes they use the former to refer to things during the trial period. Sometimes they use the latter to refer to resources that are free forever even after you've upgraded to an ostensibly pay account. It is confusing. And they make the two AMD instances just straight "always free", but for the ARM instance they give a monthly CPU/memory credit that allows you to run it for 31 days.
And then you have to search on various other things you regularly do figure out what is free or not, and that information is dispersed. For instance you can have so many volume images beyond which they are charged, etc.
Alas, I've been extremely pleased with the service. The console is a bit clunky in places but it works.
They offered a free tier and forced me to choose a shape. I chose the smallest of the two “shapes” but it was apparently not free. This was not especially clear until I got my first bill (it was extortionate; like 60eur/mo for 1cpu/2g ram) so I stopped/removed the instance.
This did not prevent me from being billed the next month, or the next month. They charged me until my card expired- then they finally cancelled the account and I paid the last bill manually. They then added another 0.1SEK charge (which is not payable, as 1SEK is the lowest denomination of currency).
I still get extremely high quantities of A4 paper through the mail box, at one point it was 29 pages of the same invoice.
I could have done something wrong here, but there is a distinct dark pattern on sign up and there are definitely bugs in the billing system.
Caveat Emptor.
EDIT: in case someone thinks I am joking. This was one of the packs: https://imgur.com/0fbsR3E