Cloud Credits, Trials and the Limits of Free

Cloud free tiers are not a marketing fiction. Oracle’s Always Free allowance
runs indefinitely, Google Cloud offers $300 over 90 days plus a small standing
instance, Azure gives $200 for 30 days alongside twelve months of selected
services, and AWS provides up to $200 in credits over six months for new
accounts. These are genuinely useful.

They are also bounded, and the boundaries are where the problems are.

Two different things, often confused

A trial credit is a sum of money with an expiry date. It
covers anything, until it runs out or the clock does. Then you pay list price
for whatever is running.

An always-free allowance is a standing quantity of specific
resources at specific sizes. It does not expire. Anything outside those exact
bounds is billed normally, from the first unit.

Mixing these up produces the most common free tier accident: choosing an
instance one size above the qualifying size and being billed in full from the
start, while believing you are inside a free allowance. The scope of each
platform’s offer is set out in the
free tiers comparison.

Where the limits actually bite

The free resource is a specific size. Not a discount on any
size. One size up is full price.

Supporting resources are often not included. The instance
may be free while its storage volume, its reserved IP address, its snapshots and
its outbound transfer are not. A deployment that is nominally free can carry a
small bill from several directions at once.

Allowances are monthly and do not accumulate. An unused
allowance this month does not carry forward.

Credits apply to usage, not to everything. Support plans,
some marketplace items and certain commitments may fall outside what a credit
covers.

Nothing stops you exceeding them. There is no hard cap. You
cross the boundary and are billed at standard rates, which is why
billing alerts belong in place
before the first deployment rather than after the first surprise.

Why production on a free tier goes wrong

Free tiers are designed for evaluation. Running something people depend on
inside one produces a recognisable set of failures.

The sizes are evaluation sizes. Always-free instances are
small. They work until real traffic arrives, and the failure mode is memory
exhaustion rather than graceful slowness.

Support is minimal. Free tiers typically come with basic
support only, which is discovered during the first incident.

The deadline is invisible. Nothing announces that a credit
has run out. Resources keep running, the subsidy stops, and the signal is an
invoice.

Idle resources may be reclaimed. Some always-free offerings
reserve the right to reclaim instances that sit idle, which is reasonable for
evaluation and unhelpful for a low-traffic production service.

There is no headroom. A free tier sized exactly to your
needs has nothing left for a traffic spike.

What free tiers are genuinely good for

• Evaluating a platform properly before committing.
• Learning, where being charged for a mistake would discourage
  experimentation.
• Development and staging environments that can be destroyed and rebuilt.
• Small personal projects where an interruption costs nothing.
• Prototypes, with a clear intention to move when it becomes real.

Oracle’s Always Free allowance is the most capable of these, and for
ARM-compatible workloads it can host genuinely useful things indefinitely. The
trade is Oracle’s registration process, which is the strictest of the ten
platforms covered here.

Using one without being caught out

1. Record the exact expiry date in a calendar on the day you open the account,
   with a reminder a month before.
2. Note the precise resource sizes that qualify, and check before changing
   anything.
3. Set billing alerts anyway, at a low threshold.
4. Check the bill in the first month to confirm what is genuinely free and
   what is not.
5. Plan the transition before the deadline, following
   free trial to production.

One thing worth stating plainly

The limits on free tiers are what make them possible. They exist because
unlimited free compute would be used for mining, spam and abuse at scale, which
is also why creating additional accounts to obtain more free usage is prohibited
and detected. Kamatera limits each customer to one account and one trial.
Oracle monitors for duplicate registrations.

The honest way to get more capacity is to pay for it, and on the
value-focused providers that is cheaper than most people expect, as covered in
when a cheap VPS beats a
hyperscaler.