Oracle halved its free ARM tier and told almost nobody

If you run a side project, a staging box or a self-hosted tool on Oracle's free ARM instance, check its size today. The Always Free allowance for Ampere A1 compute is now 2 OCPUs and 12 GB of memory per tenancy. It used to be 4 OCPUs and 24 GB. That is half the machine, and Oracle never announced the cut.

What changed

The monthly quota dropped from 3,000 OCPU hours and 18,000 GB hours to 1,500 and 9,000. Oracle's documentation now carries the lower figures. There was no blog post, no changelog entry and no advance notice — the numbers on the docs page simply changed. InfoQ dates the change to 15 June 2026.

The allowance is a tenancy-wide pool, not a per-instance cap. You can spend it as one 2-OCPU machine with 12 GB, or split it across two smaller ones, but the total is the total.

What is still unclear

Whether pay-as-you-go accounts are affected has not been settled. Oracle support has given customers contradictory answers, the documentation does not distinguish between account types, and no public clarification has been issued. If you are on PAYG with a 4-OCPU instance, treat your position as unconfirmed rather than safe.

Users who received notification emails report an enforcement date of 18 August, after which over-limit instances are terminated. That date appears in no Oracle publication, so take it as unconfirmed — but the reduced limit itself is documented, and getting under it costs you nothing.

What to do

• Add up the whole tenancy. Count OCPUs and memory across every A1 instance you have running, not just the largest one.
• Resize on your own schedule. Once an instance above the current limit is gone, recreating it at the old size may not be possible.
• Remember idle reclamation. Oracle can reclaim an Always Free instance when CPU (95th percentile), network and memory usage all stay under 20% across a seven-day period. A box you resized and forgot is a candidate.

The broader lesson is about what a free tier actually is. It is a marketing budget, not a contract, and this one was halved by editing a documentation page. Anything you would genuinely miss belongs somewhere you pay for, or somewhere you can rebuild in an afternoon.