Oracle has reduced the Always Free Ampere A1 Compute allowance on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure from 4 OCPUs and 24 GB of RAM to 2 OCPUs and 12 GB of RAM. The change took effect on June 15, 2026. Oracle did not publish a blog post, send customer notifications, or make any public announcement. The documentation was simply updated, and users discovered the new limits when their instances were shut down or when community members noticed the changed numbers on Oracle's website.
The previous allowance of 3,000 OCPU hours and 18,000 GB hours per month (equivalent to 4 OCPUs and 24 GB running continuously) was notably generous for a free cloud tier. It attracted a large community of developers, self-hosters, and Linux enthusiasts running personal servers, test environments, lightweight AI inference with Ollama, and home automation through reverse proxies. The new allowance of 1,500 OCPU hours and 9,000 GB hours halves that capacity.
The billing implications confused users for days. Linuxiac reported that the lack of notice drew immediate criticism, particularly from Pay-As-You-Go users who had upgraded their accounts to gain easier instance provisioning but still relied on Always Free resources. The concern: PAYG accounts running the old 4 OCPU configuration might silently start incurring charges for the overage. Free-only accounts face a different consequence: instances exceeding the new limits are shut down until the user manually resizes them to fit within 2 OCPUs and 12 GB.
The situation shifted on June 22 when multiple users reported that Oracle human support agents, not the chatbot, confirmed via email that the new limits apply only to free-tier accounts. PAYG accounts may still use 4 OCPUs and 24 GB at no charge. But "may" is doing heavy lifting in that sentence. As of publication, Oracle has not issued a public clarification, and the documentation does not distinguish between account types. One Reddit commenter pointed out the contradiction directly:
Oracle's current official documentation says: "All tenancies get the first 1,500 OCPU hours and 9,000 GB hours per month for free." If PAYG tenancies are truly unaffected, as Oracle Support is reportedly telling customers, then this wording is very misleading. "All tenancies" would normally include PAYG accounts.
Users are relying on screenshots of support emails rather than official policy. And even for those who kept their old 4/24 instances running, the protection may be temporary. Another commenter flagged the fine print:
The real trap is here: "If an existing resource is terminated, it may not be possible to recreate resources above the updated Always Free limit." No one can really guarantee their instances won't terminate ever, and Oracle knows it already.
That means grandfathered instances are one termination away from being locked to the new 2/12 limits permanently, whether the termination comes from maintenance, an outage, or a user mistake.
The way Oracle handled this change is the real story. Halving a free tier is a legitimate business decision. Every cloud provider adjusts free offerings over time; for instance, AWS last year with a new free plan. But doing it without a blog post, without an email to affected accounts, and without updating the documentation to clearly distinguish between free-tier and PAYG impacts creates exactly the kind of trust erosion that makes developers hesitant to build on a platform. The community found out through documentation diffs and broken instances, not through Oracle.
For affected users, the immediate action is straightforward: audit your Ampere A1 instances and ensure total usage does not exceed 2 OCPUs and 12 GB of RAM across all instances in your tenancy. If you are on a PAYG account, contact Oracle Support directly to confirm whether the old limits still apply to your account type, and save the response.
Oracle's Always Free Resources documentation reflects the current limits.