Which cloud is cheapest for small projects?
Four providers, four free tiers, and four sets of fine print that decide whether "free" means free. Here is where a small always-on project truly costs nothing — and where the answer flips.
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For a genuinely small always-on project, Oracle Cloud's Always Free tier is usually the cheapest place to keep something running at $0 indefinitely — its Arm-based Ampere allowance (roughly 4 vCPUs and 24 GB of RAM to split across instances, as of 2026) plus two free databases beat anything the big three give away for free. But "cheapest" flips the moment you need managed services, real support, or scale, where AWS, Azure, and GCP's credits and breadth win.
I get this question most from people who are not, yet, cloud engineers: a student hosting a portfolio, an indie hacker running a side project, someone learning by building a bot or a small API. The honest answer is not the same for all of them, and the marketing pages will not tell you where the free ends. So let me tell you, from having run a few of these bills down to zero and having blown a couple past it.
What "cheapest" even means here
There are two very different questions hiding inside "which cloud is cheapest," and mixing them up is how people end up disappointed.
The first is: where can I keep a small thing running for $0, more or less forever? That is an always-free question, and it has a clear winner. The second is: where do I get the most for free while I learn or prototype, even if it expires? That is a free-credit question, and the answer is different. Oracle wins the first. The big three fight over the second.
The reason is structural. AWS, Azure, and GCP built their free tiers as trials — a runway to get you comfortable, after which they expect you to pay. Oracle, coming from behind, made a genuinely open-ended free tier a marketing weapon to pull developers off the incumbents. That difference in motive is the whole story.
| Provider | Always-free VM | Free credit + window | Free managed database | The egress catch | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Oracle Cloud | Yes, and it is the big one — Ampere Arm, ~4 vCPU / 24 GB total across instances, plus two small x86 micro instances. No expiry. | Roughly $300 for 30 days on sign-up, on top of the always-free resources. | Yes — two Autonomous Databases, always free, no clock. | A monthly free egress allowance that is fairly generous for a small app; billed per GB above it. | Keeping a hobby app, bot, game server, or personal site alive at $0 forever. |
| AWS | 12-month trial: ~750 hrs/month of a t-class micro instance (one small VM run continuously). A handful of always-free services alongside. | Newer accounts get a credit-plus-plan model; historically the draw was the 12-month tier, not a big cash credit. | 12-month trial of a small RDS instance; not permanent. | Small always-free egress allowance, then per-GB — easy to trip with a popular site or large downloads. | Prototyping against the broadest service catalog and the biggest hiring market. |
| Azure | Some always-free service quotas, plus 12-month trials of small Linux/Windows VMs (limited monthly hours each). | $200 credit for the first 30 days — the most generous upfront cash of the four. | Yes — an always-free Azure SQL Database allowance and other free data options, alongside 12-month trials. | Small free egress allowance, then per-GB; the usual per-GB bill above the free bucket. | Learners aiming at enterprise jobs; strong always-free managed services beyond raw VMs. |
| Google Cloud | Yes — one small always-free e2-micro VM in select US regions, no expiry, plus always-free quotas on other services. | $300 credit for 90 days — the longest credit window of the four. | No always-free managed SQL, but generous free quotas on Firestore and BigQuery. | Small free egress allowance (with some exclusions), then per-GB. | A tiny always-on VM plus a long, generous credit runway to explore. |
Read that table with one eye on the "no expiry" column and the other on egress, because those two decide almost everything for a small project.
The catch behind each free tier
Every one of these has a trap that the sign-up flow will not warn you about. Here they are, plainly.
- Oracle: capacity and idle reclaim. The famous Ampere Arm shapes are so popular that in busy regions you can hit "out of capacity" when you try to launch one — annoying, though it usually clears if you retry or pick a quieter region. And Oracle has, at times, reclaimed always-free accounts that sit completely idle. Keep the instance doing something real and back up anything you would miss.
- AWS: the 12-month cliff. The headline 750-hours-a-month VM is a trial. Month thirteen, it silently becomes a normal paid instance, and a lot of surprise bills are just an old free-tier account that aged out with a box still running. Set an end-of-trial reminder the day you sign up.
- Azure: credit expiry, then the same cliff. The $200 is 30 days — generous, but short. After it, you fall back to the always-free services and 12-month trials, and the same "trial ended, VM kept running" trap applies. The upside is the always-free managed pieces are genuinely useful, so a small app can straddle them.
- GCP: region-locked free VM. The always-free e2-micro exists only in specific US regions. Launch outside them and you are paying from minute one. Great deal if your users are near those regions, a footnote if they are not.
- All four: the card and the egress. Every provider wants a credit card to verify you, even on the free tier, and most place a small temporary hold. And on all four, data leaving the network to the internet is the line item that bites — compute and storage sit inside free limits while a traffic spike or a fat download quietly rings up egress.
Free compute is easy to find. Free egress is the thing nobody budgets for, and it is what turns a $0 month into a $14 surprise.
Set a budget alert before you deploy anything. Every one of these clouds lets you set a spending threshold — even $1 — that emails you the moment you cross it. A free tier protects you until you step outside it; a budget alert is what tells you the instant you did. It is the single habit that separates a $0 hobbyist from a horror-story screenshot. We drill exactly this in the cost-management class.
So who should pick what
If the goal is literally "run this small thing and never pay," Oracle is the answer and it is not especially close. The Ampere allowance is more compute than the free tier of any big-three provider, it does not expire, and you get real databases with it. A personal site, a Discord bot, a low-traffic API, a small game server, a learning sandbox — all of that lives comfortably on Oracle Always Free. The price you pay is in support (there is none you would want to rely on), occasional capacity friction, and a smaller ecosystem of tutorials when something breaks.
If the goal is to learn the platform employers really hire for, cheapest-on-paper stops being the right lens. Almost nobody is hiring for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. A great many are hiring for AWS and Azure. Spending a free credit learning the cloud on your résumé is a better investment than saving twelve dollars a year on a cloud nobody interviews you about.
What the Azure reader gets — and when it is the right pick
If you landed here already leaning Azure, or you are targeting the enterprise job market, the free tier is better than Oracle's headline makes it look. You get the $200 credit for 30 days — the most upfront cash of the four — to burn on anything, including the paid services you would want to show off in a portfolio. Then you drop to a real set of always-free services: an App Service free tier that will host a small web app without a VM at all, an always-free storage and Azure SQL Database allowance, and 12-month VM trials on top.
That combination is the right pick when your project is not one always-on Linux box but a small managed app — a web front end, a database, some storage, maybe a bit of serverless. Azure's free managed services can carry that shape at $0 while teaching you the exact platform on the job posting. Oracle wins the raw-compute-forever contest; Azure wins "free and career-relevant," which for most people reading a cloud bootcamp is the contest that pays. If your project leans on functions, note that pricing models differ in ways that matter at scale — we break that down in the Azure Functions class, and the broader three-way platform comparison lives in AWS vs Azure vs GCP.
My honest steer: if this is a hobby you want to keep alive for free and forever, put it on Oracle and set a budget alert. If it is a stepping stone to a cloud job, spend Azure's or AWS's credit, build something real, and treat the $0 you did not save as tuition. Both are correct answers to different questions. Just be clear which question you are asking.
Common questions
Which cloud is actually free forever?
Oracle Cloud is the one that markets a genuinely open-ended Always Free tier — Arm-based Ampere compute (roughly 4 vCPUs and 24 GB of RAM to split across instances, as of 2026), a couple of small x86 instances, and two free autonomous databases, with no 12-month clock. AWS, Azure, and GCP all keep a set of always-free services too, but their headline compute allowances are 12-month trials, not forever. Provider terms change, so check the current free-tier page before you build.
Is Oracle Cloud free tier good enough for a real project?
For a hobby app, a personal site, a small API, a Discord bot, a game server, or a low-traffic side project, yes — the Ampere allowance is more compute than the free tier of any of the big three. The catches are real, though: capacity for the free Arm shapes can be hard to grab in popular regions, accounts can be reclaimed if they sit fully idle, and you are on your own for support. Treat it as excellent for learning and hobby hosting, not for something that must never go down.
Do I need a credit card to use a cloud free tier?
Almost always yes. AWS, Azure, GCP, and Oracle all require a card or equivalent for identity verification even on free tiers, and most place a small temporary authorization hold. The card is not charged as long as you stay inside free limits, but the free tier does not protect you from surprise bills once you cross them — set a budget alert on day one.
Why did my free cloud project still cost money?
Usually egress. Compute and storage are often free within limits, but data leaving the provider's network to the internet is billed per gigabyte once you pass a small monthly allowance, and a popular site or a large download can blow through it. The other common surprises are a 12-month trial quietly ending, a managed service left running past its free window, and a second resource you forgot you created. A budget alert catches all of these.