Oracle Cloud free tier vs AWS free tier
Both are marketed as "free." Only one of them is still free in month thirteen — and that single word, permanence, decides which one you should point your project at.
New to cloud? CAMPUX is a free, build-first course. Start here →
The difference that matters between these two is permanence. Oracle's Always Free tier gives you real compute — an Ampere Arm allowance up to about 4 cores and 24 GB of memory — that is designed to stay free with no time limit. AWS's headline free tier is mostly a 12-month trial: 750 hours a month of a t2/t3.micro that starts billing once the year runs out. AWS wins on breadth and on always-free serverless allowances; Oracle wins on a permanent free box.
I have run small always-on things on both — a status page, a couple of bots, a personal API that a few dozen people hit. The two free tiers feel similar on the signup screen and behave completely differently a year later, when one of them quietly starts charging you and the other does not. That is the whole story, but the details underneath it change which one you should reach for. Let me lay them side by side honestly. If you want the wider "what's the cheapest way to host a hobby project across all the clouds" question, I wrote that up separately in the cheapest cloud for small projects — this piece is the narrow Oracle-versus-AWS head-to-head.
The one distinction that decides it
Every cloud free tier is really two tiers wearing one label, and almost nobody reads the seam between them:
- Trial credits and 12-month promotions — generous, headline-grabbing, and time-boxed. They exist to get you in the door and onto a paid card. AWS's famous 750 hours is this kind.
- Always-free allowances — smaller, quieter, and genuinely permanent. They exist because the provider can afford to give a slice away forever. Oracle's Arm compute is this kind, and it is unusually large for what it is.
Read the two free tiers through that lens and the marketing melts away. AWS's biggest number is a promotion. Oracle's biggest number is a standing allowance. If your project is a weekend experiment you will delete in a month, the distinction does not touch you. If it is something you want running at no cost two years from now, it is the only thing that matters.
A 12-month free tier is not free. It is a bill with a one-year fuse.
Side by side, 2026
Prices and allowances shift, and free tiers get quietly re-cut — always confirm against the provider's own free-tier page and pricing calculator before you commit. This is the shape of it as of 2026, described as models rather than to-the-penny quotes.
| What you get | Oracle Always Free | AWS Free Tier |
|---|---|---|
| Compute | Permanent. Ampere Arm (A1) allowance up to ~4 vCPU and 24 GB memory, split across 1–4 instances. Plus two small AMD micro VMs. No time limit. | 12-month trial. 750 hrs/month of a t2.micro or t3.micro (one small x86 box, all month). Bills at on-demand rates after month 12. |
| Databases | Permanent. Two Autonomous Databases (ATP/ADW), 20 GB each. Genuinely capable managed DBs at no cost. | 12-month trial. 750 hrs/month of an RDS db.t-micro + 20 GB storage. Bills after a year. DynamoDB has a separate always-free storage grant. |
| Storage | Permanent. ~200 GB total block volume + 10 GB object + 10 GB archive, always free. | 12-month trial. 30 GB EBS + 5 GB S3. S3's small always-free grant is far thinner than the trial number. |
| Serverless allowances | Functions with a monthly always-free invocation grant, but a thinner surrounding serverless ecosystem. | Always free (no expiry). Lambda ~1M requests + 400,000 GB-seconds/month, plus always-free API Gateway/SNS/SQS grants. This is AWS's real permanent strength. |
| Egress (data out) | Large monthly outbound allowance (historically ~10 TB/month on the free account) — very hard to exceed on a hobby project. | ~100 GB/month free egress across services, then per-GB charges. Tighter, and the classic source of surprise bills. |
| The catch | Capacity. Always-Free Arm cores are scarce in popular regions — "out of capacity" on create is common. Idle instances can be reclaimed. Free forever in policy; not always available in practice. | The clock. Month 13 flips trial resources to full on-demand pricing, and a forgotten running instance becomes a real invoice. The always-free serverless slice survives; the VM does not. |
Where Oracle wins
The Ampere Arm allowance is the reason people put up with everything else about Oracle Cloud. Up to four Arm cores and 24 GB of memory, free with no expiry, is enough to run a small database, an app server, a reverse proxy, and a couple of side services on one machine — the kind of box you would pay real money for elsewhere. There is no equivalent permanent free VM on AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud. If your requirement is literally "a Linux server that stays up and stays free," Oracle is not just the best option, it is close to the only one.
The two Autonomous Databases sweeten it. A managed, self-tuning database at no cost is a genuinely useful thing to have sitting behind a project, and most people never touch the paid tier.
Where AWS wins
Breadth, and permanence in a different shape. AWS's always-free tier is built around serverless, and for an event-driven workload that is a stronger permanent deal than it looks. Roughly a million Lambda requests and 400,000 GB-seconds of compute a month, free forever, will host a surprising amount of real traffic before you pay a cent — and it scales to zero when nobody is using it, which a running VM never does. Pair that with always-free DynamoDB storage and you can build a genuinely permanent, genuinely free small app with no server to reclaim and no capacity queue to wait in.
Then there is the ecosystem. AWS has more services, more documentation, more tutorials, and more job postings than Oracle Cloud will ever have. The skills transfer. Time spent learning AWS is time spent on something a hiring manager recognizes — which Oracle Cloud, for all its generosity, mostly is not. I dug into the serverless side of this specifically in Lambda vs Azure Functions if that is the workload you care about.
AWS's gap is the calendar. The 750-hour tier is a 12-month clock that starts the day you sign up, and the single most common cloud mistake I see is a forgotten free-tier instance that has been billing at on-demand rates since month thirteen. Set a reminder for month eleven. Oracle's gap is capacity and reclaim. "Always free" is a policy, not a guarantee that a free Arm core exists in your region today — popular regions run dry, creation fails, and idle Always-Free instances can be reclaimed. Free forever only helps if you can get one and keep it warm.
The Azure reader's cut
Most of you reading this are learning Azure, so here is where it sits, because Azure is neither of these — it is the middle path. A new Azure account gives you a 200 US dollar credit for 30 days plus 12 months of popular services free, and then a set of always-free services that persist after that: a small App Service allowance, Azure Functions with a monthly grant, Cosmos DB's free tier, and more. Azure has no permanent free VM like Oracle's Arm box — that is the one thing it cannot match. But its always-free serverless and PaaS allowances are real, and the ecosystem is the one most enterprise jobs run on.
So the mental model is: Oracle for a permanent free server, AWS for permanent free serverless plus the biggest ecosystem, Azure for the always-free PaaS slice attached to the platform that most reliably turns into a paycheck. If you want the full multi-cloud ranking rather than this pairwise cut, the cheapest cloud for small projects roundup lines all four up. And if you are still deciding which cloud to invest your learning hours in, the AWS vs Azure vs GCP class makes that call on job-market grounds rather than free-tier ones.
Which one to reach for
Strip it to a decision:
- You want a small server that stays up and stays free past a year — Oracle Always Free, no contest, capacity permitting. Nothing else on the market gives you a permanent free VM this size.
- You want a permanent free serverless app or you want skills that transfer — AWS, for the always-free Lambda grant and the ecosystem behind it.
- You are learning for a cloud job, especially an enterprise one — build on Azure's mix, and treat Oracle's Arm box as a free place to host side projects rather than the platform you study.
Whichever you pick, the discipline is the same one that separates a certified beginner from someone who is actually job-ready: know exactly when the free stops. Put a billing alert on the account, set a calendar reminder for the AWS 12-month mark, and treat "free tier" as a thing with edges, not a promise. That habit — reading the seam between a promotion and a standing allowance, and owning the bill before it owns you — is the whole of cost management in one small muscle.
Common questions
Is Oracle Cloud free tier really free forever?
The Always Free resources are, by design, meant to stay free with no time limit — that includes the Ampere Arm compute, two autonomous databases, and a block/object storage allowance. The catch is not a clock, it is capacity: Always Free Arm cores are in constant demand in popular regions, so you can hit "out of capacity" on creation, and Oracle reserves the right to reclaim idle Always Free instances. It is free forever in policy; whether you can always get one is the real question.
What happens to the AWS free tier after 12 months?
Most of the headline AWS free tier — the 750 hours a month of t2/t3.micro, the 30 GB of EBS, the RDS allowance — is a 12-month trial that starts from the day you open the account. After month 12 those resources bill at normal on-demand rates, which surprises people who forgot they left a box running. Separately, AWS has "always free" allowances that do not expire, mainly serverless: roughly 1 million Lambda requests and 400,000 GB-seconds a month, DynamoDB storage, and similar. So AWS is not entirely a trial — but its always-free compute is serverless, not a VM.
Oracle Cloud or AWS free tier for a small always-on project?
For a small server that must stay running past a year at no cost, Oracle wins clearly — the Always Free Ampere instance is the only mainstream permanent free VM, and up to about 4 Arm cores with 24 GB of memory is generous. For a serverless, event-driven project that fits inside request and compute allowances, AWS's always-free tier can also run indefinitely at no cost and has far more services around it. Pick Oracle for a permanent box, AWS for permanent serverless plus breadth.
How does Azure's free tier compare to Oracle and AWS?
Azure sits between them. New accounts get a 200 US dollar credit for 30 days plus 12 months of popular services free, then a set of always-free services after that — including a small App Service allowance, Functions with a monthly grant, and Cosmos DB free tier. Azure has no permanent free VM like Oracle's Arm box, but its always-free serverless and PaaS allowances are real and its ecosystem is what most enterprise jobs run on. For learning that maps to hiring, Azure's mix is the one to build on.