Oracle's free tier is cool. I've let my free instance expire and so far haven't noticed them doing anything weird with my credit card info.

Also haven't been sued yet. But let's see.

If your tenancy is unpaid your "always free"-classed instances can be terminated without notice in order to provide capacity for a paid tenancy when necessary. You can upgrade to paid tenancy and simply keep using "always free" resources for a $0.00 monthly bill.

I'm still on unpaid tenancy and oracle docs say that reclaim servers which are under or overutilized.

I use my oracle free servers (and one paid vps on hetzner) as automatic cloud fallbacks if my homelab is inaccessible over the internet for some reason. Which means I fall in the underutilized category as most of the time workload is under 2%. So I "fake" work to prevent reclaimation by oracle and its worked well so far.

``` # Oracle Cloud reclaims idle resources # https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/FreeTier/freetier...

- name: Create cronjob for minimum CPU utilization

  ansible.builtin.cron:

    name: fake work to prevent re-claimation

    special_time: hourly

    job: timeout 30s sha1sum /dev/zero

```

Oracle did not accept my credit card. The same one AWS has been charging successfully for years.

But I don't really want to do business with Oracle anyway, maybe it's better so.

Can confirm, they are very picky about the credit cards they accept.

Surprises me a little because I feel like I often fall victim to such things and had no issue at all. I used a fairly fresh N26 card - N26 is quite infamous for being easy for criminals to sign up for and being quite shady itself.